I decided to spring for my own copy of Acrobat 8, thinking I’ll surely have use for it in the future, and it’s all a business expense anyway. Then I recall that Acrobat 8 Pro is included in the just-released Adobe Creative Suite 3: Web: Premium edition, which I planned to buy anyway, just not right this minute. It would be foolish to pay for Acrobat 8 just to replace it later.

In the interest of getting my stubby little fingers on the software right this minute, I decided to go whole hog on CS3 Web Premium and spend $1600 at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, the local Apple store had none in stock, and no ETA on when more copies would arrive. Ordering directly from Adobe displays the statement “usually ships in 7 days,” with no way of knowing just what “usually” means in this particular circumstance. I could buy the 3.2 gigabyte download from Adobe and get the whole thing right this minute (after a few painful hours of downloading, that is), except I really would prefer the nice box and an official install disc, rather than burn my own backup. Call me picky.

So it’s off to PriceGrabber to see who offers the best price as well as overnight shipping. The winner was SoftwareMedia.com, who offered the suite at $30 below retail. Of course, overnight shipping is $30, so I only broke even. So be it. I held my breath and placed my order, excited at the prospect of having it within 48 hours.

But no, it just couldn’t be that easy, could it? I awake to an E-mail informing me that SoftwareMedia has no copies CS3 Web Premium Full in stock, and they’re planning instead to ship me CS2 Full, along with the upgrade to CS3. Yes, this would equally accomplish the same goal of getting working, legal copies of the latest versions of the suite overnight. But I really want full installers for CS3, preferably right this minute. Call me picky.

I phoned SoftwareMedia’s customer support, intending to either cancel the order or at least find out how much it would be delayed if I waited until they got the full version in stock. Alas, no ETA. Nice distribution, Adobe. The helpful chap on the line did some poking around and it seems one of their third-party distributors actually has it in stock, right this minute, and is willing to ship overnight. But they’re in California, as am I, so it would add $107 in sales tax that the Utah-based SoftwareMedia wouldn’t have charged me. The other option would be for the warehouse in CA to overnight the package to UT, where they could then overnight it right back to me and save me the sales tax, but it would take an extra day. Quite the conundrum.

I had two choices: pay sales tax and get it the next day, or pay a second overnight charge and get it in two days. Perhaps foolishly, I opted to save myself 77 bucks and wait an extra day. Call me stingy.

So at this moment, my shiny copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3: Web: Premium: Full is winging its way from a warehouse in California to a warehouse in Utah, thence to be sent back to California, and I should have it by noon on Friday. Meanwhile, I’m still unable to provide review comments on the PDF of Chapter 4, so perhaps I’ll fill the time by trying to sort out why OS X thinks this copy of Acrobat 5 is an undefined file.

Update: I didn’t realize Acrobat 5 predates OS X. Supposedly, I could install it by first installing OS 9 and running in “Classic mode,” but that’s a hoop I just won’t jump. Commenting on PDFs will have to wait until CS3 arrives. Note to Apress: you should invest a multi-user license for a newer Mac version of Acrobat for your Mac-lovin’ authors.

Though my anti-social tendencies meant I barely spoke to anyone all day, it was overall an enjoyable and informative experience. With the exception of one particular session that stuck in my craw.

At 4pm, Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis of Advantage Consulting Services took the platform to lead a discussion on search engine optimization (SEO) as it pertains to WordPress. With all due respect to Neil and Cameron, the discussion was disjointed, overwrought, jargon-heavy and focused too much on “how to cater to search engines” and not enough on “how to make your website findable and relevant.” It was far too symptomatic of exactly what’s wrong with the SEO cottage industry, where the emphasis tends to be on quantity over quality.

But rather than stand up to hijack the conversation and steer it onto the track I think it should have been on (nobody likes That Guy), I simply left the room. And now I’m issuing corrections from the safety and relative anonymity of my own blog.

“Search engine optimization” is a misnomer. What we should be talking about is content optimization — making content valuable, relevant, and findable. If you can do that, search engines will work as they should, without any special hacks or chicanery.

Content is for people

It begins with the obvious: computers are stupid. They cannot think or comprehend the human languages in which our content is encoded. A human being can read a length of text and discern the abstract thought behind it, but a nonsentient machine only sees a sequence of bits. They require specific instructions to format a bunch of plain text into something readable by humans. So we invent computer languages like HTML, which consists of structural markers indicating the nature of the human-language content those markers delineate. We can then program computers to parse those embedded structural markers, or tags, and react accordingly.

A computer can’t grasp the meaning of a paragraph, but it can be instructed that a paragraph begins at <p> and ends at </p>, and is hence comprised of all the symbols and strings between. Especially sophisticated programs can even locate patterns and extrapolate that some strings of symbols match other strings of symbols, and we call those programs search engines.

Now that we understand how browsers and search engines work, we can comfortably disregard them. Search engines are tools, not entities. The content you create is meaningless to the search engines, so stop trying to create content for them. Google is not your audience. Write content for people, and give it the simple structure machines require to serve their human masters.

Search engines exist to allow people to find the precise snippet of information they need in the vast sea of mostly-garbage that covers the web. Good search engines are good because they satisfy a human need. Gaming the system — exploiting the inner workings of search tools in order to inflate your site’s ranking or visibility — will only yield short-term results at best, and will ultimately force search engineers to rewrite their software to filter out yet more garbage.

After years of abuse from inscrupulous SEO types the keyword <meta> element was rendered worthless, and search engines now ignore it. When Google pioneered their PageRank system, which factors inbound links into a site’s perceived relevance and credibility, SEO hucksters set up link farms and started spamming the universe with their trash links, and the web has suffered for it. Because search spammers stuff irrelevant keywords into alt and title attributes, search engines must now largely ignore those valuable semantic devices as well.

In short, gaming the system only damages the system, and is of no benefit to the human audience you’re trying to reach.

Making a site findable is neither voodoo nor rocket surgery. If your content is meaningful and informative, people will find it. It’s as simple as that. When your content is also structured in a way that is easily parsed by machines (here I’m pimping the web standards Kool-Aid), search engines will perform their tasks more efficiently, in turn allowing people to easily find your content.

On keywords

In SEO jargon, “keywords” are those terms and phrases that people are most likely to enter in the search field. They are the string patterns that nonsentient computers will use as the basis for their matching process. When the engine finds a match, it returns a result. Results are then sorted on various criteria: PageRank, juxtaposition with other entered terms, the semantic weight of the element the term is contained in, its position in the document heirarchy, etc. All with the goal of letting the most relevant results rise to the top so a person won’t have to dig as deep to find the information they’re after.

SEO experts talk a lot about the importance of keywords. They say keywords are given more significance when they occur near the beginning of a document, so your first paragraph should be well-saturated. A document with keywords in its <title> may rank a bit higher and will certainly display the words on the results page, so make sure your document titles are fully loaded. When keywords are repeated throughout the content, the page as a whole appears more relevant, so be sure to repeat yourself. If the keyword appears in an inbound link from another site, you’ll get a huge boost in PageRank. This is the advice you’ll get from SEO specialists, and it’s all true to varying degrees.

But it’s crap. Ignore it.

The SEO keyword game usually takes a backwards approach, encouraging authors to find out what people are searching for, then inject those terms into their content. Unfortunately this just leads to shitty content. Peppering your text willy-nilly with targeted keywords may be good for search engines, but search engines are stupid, and human beings don’t want to read a bunch of overstuffed marketspeak. Forget about “keywords” and just use the right words. Be simple, informative, and readable. People will search with the words they use every day. If you write with those words, you’ll show up in the searches. Stop worrying about the search engines and write for people.

Leading an article with an introduction that summarizes its purpose is just good writing, with a long journalistic tradition, and so search engines pay attention to the first few paragraphs. Descriptive headlines make long articles more scannable for human readers, so search engines will notice headings that are properly marked as such. When a site links to yours using a particular phrase it implies that the target document pertains to the topic, so search engines automatically apply a topcoat of credibility.

Search engines work this way because people think this way, and so it’s how people want search engines to work (circular reasoning at its best). There is no mysterious code to be cracked. When content is created for people, search engines can function as designed. Overt SEO tactics tend to obfuscate and cheapen content in order to capture eyeballs, rather than actually offering the information people are looking for. When your content satisfies a human need, humans will seek it out and lavish it with appreciation.

Welcome to the machine

After all this talk about writing content for people, it remains a plain fact that web content must be shipped and handled by machines, which brings us back to HTML. Search engine robots (spiders, crawlers, whatever you want to call them) do not read rendered text. They are user-agents, like browsers, that parse the same plaintext markup browsers parse when formatting text for display. If the markup is especially complex or malformed, the robots must work harder to glean the content from the structure, to the detriment of the content. It follows that simpler markup allows the content to stand proud.

In HTML, tags are used to indicate the nature and purpose of the content they enclose, and to differentiate one bit of text from the next. <p> means “this is a paragraph”, <ul> means “this is an unordered list” and <h1> means “this is the top-level heading.” Wrapping your content in tags that support and enhance its natural meaning will allow searchbots to “understand” it, to take some anthropomorphic license, what with computers being stupid and all. The semantics web standards advocates are always raving about is simply the craft of using the most appropriate and meaningful element for the content at hand.

Back to camp

And what does all this have to do with WordPress? As Neil noted onstage, WordPress is pretty well optimized right out of the box. It encourages clean, semantic markup — headings are headings, paragraphs are paragraphs, lists are lists. I suppose someone could build a theme bloated with dense, presentational markup if they wanted to, but I haven’t come across one lately.

So let’s take a look at the key points made at WordCamp, according to Neil’s writeup:

Add a unique meta description tag to all of your pages. Keep it short and do put tons of keywords in it. You can use the head meta description plugin to add a unique description tag automatically to each page.

The <meta name="description" /> element contains a summary description of the document’s contents, and so is a good thing to have. However, its impact on search ranking is minimal. In SEO circles, it’s usually abused as a receptacle for more keyword stuffing. Neil and Cameron emphasized that a unique description will increase the uniqueness of the entire document, thus preventing it from being relagated to those hits buried under the “omitted results” link. But the document should already be unique because it has unique content. If its content is not unique, then it should be removed from results. Let search engines do their jobs.

When a keyword is found in the content, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) display it in context as it appears in the document. Some search engines will also display the contents of <meta name="description" /> in those rare cases where the page is a hit (for some reason), but the searched terms don’t actually appear on it. Such results are usually irrelevant to the search, so it’s a bit sleazy to fake relevance with an innaccurate description.

Modify your title tags to say the title of the post entry first and then your blog name. (or remove your blog name from the title tag all together)

Agreed wholeheartedly. This has no impact on search ranking, but will definitely increase your site’s visibility among the pool of results. It emphasizes the page title over the site name. I should probably do this myself. Right now my titles follow the “Site Name :: Archive » Post Title” model, which isn’t really ideal. At the very least I need to ditch the “Archive”, which accomplishes nothing, and the angle quote, which is typographically abusive. In fact, why am I talking about it? By the time this post goes live I will have changed my titles. There, done.

WordPress has titles (tooltip) on most of their links. They start off with “Permanent link to”, we recommend removing the “Permanent link to” part.

First off, titles are not tooltips. True, most browsers display the contents of the title attribute as a mouseover tooltip, but that is not the attribute’s purpose. A title provides additional descriptive information about the element. In the case of links, the title attribute should describe the destination, to give some further hint at what can be expected when the link is activated.

Permanent links in WordPress are given a default title of “Permanent link to Post Title,” which describes the element, but not its destination. “Permanent link” is blogger jargon, understood to mean “the URI where this post is permanently kept.” As such, the title attribute could more accurately read “Permanent location of Post Title.” It shouldn’t simply repeat the post title itself because that text already exists, making the title redundant and useless. Neil’s recommendation doesn’t help semantics and doesn’t help searchers.

Try to add good content on a regular basis to keep your blog fresh. The more the better, but quality content is generally better then quantity.

I can add nothing to this. Well stated.

Create a sitemap for your blog, you can use the Google webmaster tools.

The SEO reasoning behind sitemaps is to provide a collection of crawlable links, giving searchbots full access to index all your content. If your site has decent navigation in place already, a sitemap doesn’t give bots much they don’t already have. However, sitemaps are still very good to have for accessibility and usability reasons, especially on large sites with a complex architecture. For WordPress blogs, the sitemap can be easily accomplished with an archives page. I use Justin Blanton‘s Smart Archives plugin, but there are alternatives.

Join in on the conversation. Link and trackback to others.

Commenting on other weblogs — and giving trackback links when you write about them — will bring more traffic to your own blog. If your content is worthwhile, some of that traffic will eventually result in genuine, unsolicited links from other sites, bringing the coveted PageRank juice with it. But don’t comment just for the linkage, be sure you have something to contribute. That’s just good netizenship.

Leverage the existing mediums out there such as digg and del.icio.us to bring in traffic and build links.

I must conscientiously object to the use of “leverage” as a verb. But that pet peeve aside, this is just more traffic-mongering for the sake of building PageRank, and says nothing about offering content that is worth digging and bookmarking.

Parting shot

Content that works for people will succeed, content that only works for search engines is destined to fail. As more content is generated with the specific agenda of luring disembodied eyeballs, rather than actually meeting the needs of an audience, that content will become less and less viable. Today’s shady SEO tactics will become ineffective, and practitioners will resort to new and lower trickery until they eventually satisfy the rules of natural selection and go out of business. Search engines as they are today will eventually stop working when they can no longer satisfy the human need to locate valuable information. A new content-finding methodology will appear, replacing the word-based indexed search once it has become impractical.

Stop hurting the web. Write content for people, give it a clean and meaningful structure, and leave the search engines to their task.

The search engine optimization industry, like the spam trade, was spawned from opportunity rather than neccessity, and blossomed into a dubious Ouroboros, creating its own food supply to sustain itself. It’s only a matter of time until entropy breaks down and it eats its own head.

The Matrix is on TNT as I type this, a film which contains a few naughty words. At one point Neo made the profane exclamation “jeepers creepers.” This was their poorly-dubbed replacement for the phrase “Jesus Christ”, which is apparently offensive to some people for some reason (something about a commandment I think). I’m sure TNT — and their parent company, Time-Warner — don’t want to upset their constituents in picket-fenced townships in the flyover states, the kinds of people who would be so outraged at the airing of casual blasphemy in their floral-printed family rooms that they would surely write angry letters and boycott advertisers. But come on, “jeepers creepers”?!

A few minutes earlier, as Agent Smith offered Neo a clean slate in exchange for handing over Morpheus, Neo’s witty counter-offer was to “give you a flipper” followed by a clumsy jump-cut edit. Those who recall the film will know that Neo’s original response was to “give you the finger” and execute a rude gesture. I could understand them not wishing to show the offending digit, but since when is the word “finger” on the List of Seven? A few minutes before that, Trinity was heard to utter the word “shucks” as an expression of her anger and frustration. I could tolerate “shoot” as a phonetic replacement, or the scatalogically correct yet oddly acceptable “crap,” but seriously, has anyone used the word “shucks” non-sarcastically since 1955?

I can accept that a commercial network, even on basic cable, would need to adjust a film’s content for broadcast. But the real problem here is the arbitrary modification of someone else’s art. By putting silly schoolyard expletives into the mouths of these characters, the censors are completely changing the tone and intent of what the filmmakers have created. Changing a character’s dialogue effectively changes the character, and shouldn’t that be the choice of the people who created it? Morpheus and Neo are supposed to be elite cyberninjas, not Wally and the Beaver.

If you must water down a movie for broadcast, what’s so wrong with a bleep or unobtrusive simple silence? I find that much less distracting than allegedly tough grownups calling each other “melon farmers” (an actual example from a TV edit of Repo Man). We all know what they’re saying anyway so it’s pointless to pretend they said something else. Delete the expletives if you must, but don’t substitute stilted playground hokum.

Do network executives and FCC politicians really think we’re all such infants that we need to be protected from rampant potty mouth? Or perhaps we should blame the clench-cheeked letter-writers, the holy rolling Stepford wives who want to ban everything their kids enjoy so they can avoid ever having to actually talk to their kids. They need to loosen up too. An adult character in a movie marketed to other adults should be allowed to exclaim realistically in an intense situation. If someone extracted an organo-metallic insect from my navel I’d probably scream much harsher words than “Jesus Christ.”

As it is, we usually resort to ’ to get something that looks like a curly apostrophe. A right single quote — more correctly a “single end quote” — is plainly not an apostrophe, even if they do look identical. Using the wrong character in the wrong place is just fundamentally, well, wrong, and it violates my idealistic desire for markup purity. It makes me feel icky.

So what’s the big deal? Aren’t a single end quote and an apostrophe really the same character (in most web-ready fonts, anyway) when you get right down to brass pixels? Perhaps my objection isn’t to the character itself, but to the HTML named entity “’“, an abbreviation of “right single quote” which lingers in my document source, mocking me, flaunting its wrongness. A while back I decided to start using the entity number (’) instead of the entity name, just to take the edge off slightly, to sublimate that wrongness (as a side benefit it’s also a bit more consistently supported in older browsers). But the wrongness is still there in the back of my mind, festering, rasping, gnawing through the wires and making the place smell of burnt hair and cabbage.

Yet I demand at least the semblance of curly apostrophes, and refuse to use straight ones if I have anything to say about it. A straight quote/apostrophe indicates a measurement in feet, double straight quotes are inches. My pedantic skin is crawling even referring to them as “straight quotes” for explanatory reasons (they’re actually slanted right in some typefaces, vertical in others). They are properly called single prime and double prime, or, in a pinch, “foot mark” and “inch mark” but that’s seriously pushing it. Those symbols are simply not an acceptable substitute for correct punctuation.

But for all my persnickity fulminations about correct quotes, I easily let it slide when it comes to writing code. I feel not the slightest twinge or pang when “double quoting” my attribute values in XHTML, for example. In code, script or markup (the three are different classes of computer language, but that’s the subject of another post) I’m quite happy to use the same generic character to mark both the beginning and ending of a value or string. It could just as easily be ^ or * or |, the choice of false quotes is arbitrary in my book.

The solution to the curly apostrophe issue in rendered HTML is simple. We already have the ' entity, ' if you prefer). It’s well supported, just not drawn the right way. So how about it, browser makers of the world? I’ll let you keep " for displaying code in a web document, it’ll just be up to us to rap the knuckles of any web developers using it in place of “ and ”. But please give me curly apostrophes so I can make it through ridiculous phrases like “He’s prob’ly thinkin’, ‘I’m 6'4"’” without an apoplectic fit.

Witness Madonna breathily warbling her Pepsi anthem while trotting a dazed and misplaced Birhan Woldu around the stage in front of swirling Kabbalist CGI. In 1984, Woldu was immortalized as the “Face of Famine,” a little girl who was narrowly rescued from starvation and is today a healthy and beautiful young woman. She is alive today because she and her family recieved charitable aid from other concerned nations 20 years ago. She was brought onstage as a moving testament to the impact foreign aid can have on a single precious life, and was then was quickly reduced to a PR photo-op.

But mostly I’m sickened by ABC television’s pathetic coverage. Their brief highlight program rearranged the playing order to maximize broad appeal to the American audience and was riddled with commercial breaks, usually cutting short the performances to make more time to cram in advertising. And Pink Floyd — with Dave Gilmour reuniting with Roger Waters for the first time since their messy breakup over 20 years ago, easily the most momentous high point of the entire concert and the only reason I watched at all — was insultingly sandwiched between Will Smith and Madonna, only warranting about five and a half minutes of airtime. They got most of the way through Money (one of only four songs they performed) before the network cut away to a paid advertisement for an over-the-counter allergy medicine. Paul McCartney’s closing performance was at least in the proper slot, but afterwards Bob Geldof’s parting remarks were pre-empted for an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Way to suck, ABC.

When all is said and done, these concerts will not likely change the course of history. The screaming crowds of fist-pumping complacent youth will go home and sleep off their buzz and go right back to the comfort of indifference in the morning. World politicians will still blindly act in the best interests of their own companies countries. Millions were spent on throwing these ego-stroking spectacles, ostensibly with the goal of asking the world powers to contribute millions in assistance to suffering nations. Is that hypocrisy I smell?