Vivant Media

No, I’m not talking about search engine rankings going bad. I’m talking about SEO techniques making website functionality break.

If you take a plain-vanilla website that’s been built with only HTML and images, that’s an easy site to optimize for SEs. However, throw in things like dynamic pages, URL rewrites, redirects, and so on and it gets harder and harder to optimize your pages for the stupid search engines.

While I totally support most of the SEO methods, such as using meta tags wisely, using the alt tag, increased use of heading tags, and etc… I don’t agree with radically changing the website’s underlying framework for the sake of SEO. A line must be drawn somewhere.

Sure, if you went balls-to-the-wall on SEO, your pages would soar in search rankings. Tons of people would flock to your website. You might get rich off the advertising revenue. But what good is all of that… if the techniques cause your site to be modified to the point where it’s running poorly?

Some thoughts on this would be appreciated!

You’ve seen the horrors before. You were browsing a site that had a really cool design, and you view-sourced it to learn about their underlying code.

But… it… was… a… disaster!!!

You cringe as you look at the code within the newly opened window. You look away, then back again. You can’t help it as you sit there staring incredulously. It’s like gawking at a car accident as you drive by. Nobody can resist doing that.

Are there any unclosed tags? Do they still use… *gasp* …tables?! Does the page even validate at all?

Coding nightmares like these often incur headaches of equivalent magnitude to one caused by a room full of screaming and crying five-year-olds.

All of that could be avoided altogether if everybody wrote clean, consistent, valid and standards compliant XHTML code. Unfortunately, that’s about as likely as pigs flying out of my ass while smoking a joint and singing Oops, I Did It Again.

Close your tags, use an efficient structure, convert to a tableless and CSS-based layout, and the world will become a little better. And you just might save several thousand coders from premature deaths attributed to stress and brain tumors (all caused by the headaches).