Buy The Book
Nine By Blue founder Vanessa Fox is author of the critically acclaimed Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business, which has been called the “search marketing bible” by technology leaders. Be sure to pick up you copy today from Amazon.com.
More Information »
Category: Blog
April 8, 2008
95% of internet users (750 million people) searched in October 2007.
Web developers generally make sure their applications are accessible by the major browsers. After all, [Internet Explorer users represent 54% of those online and Firefox users are about 37% of those online], so you’d be cutting out a large chunk of potential customers if your app didn’t work for visitors using those browsers. EDITED: This number is obviously reflective of one data point, but as someone in the comment points out, it can vary. For instance, Wikipedia has IE at about 75% share. My visitors use IE just over 50% of the time and Firefox nearly 40%.
But what about that 95% who are searching for you? Doesn’t it make sense to make sure your application is accessible via search as well?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is sometimes seen in a bad light, filled with spamming and deception and trickery. But what’s sometimes called “SEO” is more accurately called “spamming”. True SEO is much more akin to making sure your pages render on Firefox and when done well, increases not only findability, but accessibility and usability as well. Pages designed using SEO principles render well on mobile devices, screen readers, for those with slow connections who turn off images, for novice users who are still on older browsers, and for savvy users who block Flash and javascript.
If you’re developing web applications and you want to make sure your code is well-optimized for search, where do you start? You can check out these resources:
- Nathan Buggia’s MIX08 Presentation: Advanced SEO For Developers
- SEO and asp.net
- Colin Cochrane’s asp.net/SEO posts
- A List Apart: Findability
A Conference for Web Application Developers: All About SEO
For a comprehensive deep dive into infrastructure issues and solutions for both the Microsoft and LAMP stacks, diagnostic tools and checklists, and practical tips for building web apps that searchers can easily find, check out the Search Marketing Expo Developer Day conference, happening June 4th in Seattle. We’ll end the day with in-depth, technical site reviews that bring together everything presented throughout the day.
Interested in speaking? Submit your pitch now!
If you are a web developer, I’d love to hear about the issues you are most interested in learning more about. Let me know in the comments!
9 Comments
Leave a Reply
Welcome to the Nine By Blog where you'll find commentary and breaking news from the online marketing industry. Be sure to join in the discussion in the comments section. For reference material and detailed analysis visit the learning center.
Categories
- Blog (183)
- Technical Web Development (23)
- SEO Fundamentals (4)
- Ranking and Display (3)
- Integrated Marketing (26)
- Events (9)
- Content Strategy (29)
Thanks Vanessa! This is just the sort of targeted info that will not only make our lives easier when interacting with Dev teams, but might also alert them to how easy it is to take SEO into account as they mange their own workflows.
Nice work – excellent resources.
Duane
Pingback: Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
I believe Brian Chappell (brianchappell.com) was writing something on ‘Drupal SEO’ for Search Marketing Standard (ok a CMS isn’t a language, but still) and similarly for Joomla at SEOmoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-for-joomla-sites
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-complete-introduction-to-joomla-seo
Pingback: Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
“Internet Explorer users represent about 54% of those online and Firefox users are about 37% of those online”
Hah? Where you gettin’ those stats? I work with a few multimillion dollar ecommerce sites, and I can tell you that the IE-vs.-FF ratio goes from 82% vs. 13% to 78% to 14%. I’m no IE fan (love the FF, love Opera, and the new Safari for Windows is also a winner), but I have to call ‘em like I see ‘em, and I don’t see IE use falling anywhere near the halfway mark.
Yep, I have seen the same, so I was surprised by the numbers I found. The stats come from the page I’ve linked, but even they say “Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.”
I’ve edited the paragraph to reflect a wider range of stats sources.
Pingback: adCenter Analytics
Yes, I was expecting pictures! Honestly.
On our customer sites I see 80-85% IE echoing what Winooski said.