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Been a little while since I’ve posted here, a friend sent this on today and it’s absolutely mesmerizing. Enjoy it.

Derek Powazek recently posted a scathing blog post on SEO that got linked up just about everywhere. He argues that dedicated SEO roles are useless and actually harmful. I partially agree with him. The google bombing tactics of piss poor sites doesn’t do us any good. Derek sums it up by saying, “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

That I completely agree with. To me, it’s all about the second sentence: Tell people about it. And the tools are getting easier, but there are still some big challenges here. And opportunities too. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are all amazingly powerful tools. These are huge vehicles for casting the net far and wide. But integrating your content with them can still be a challenge, especially for the layman.

And notifying search engines of the pages on your site is whole other ball of wax. One of the more challenging projects I undertook at Fanzter was generating our sitemap files. As our sites grew, the number of pages in our index just got absolutely insane. A nightly job just couldn’t hack it anymore and needed to be completely rewritten. There are quite a few plugins written to tackle this problem. I haven’t done a side by side comparison or tried any of these out yet, but I’m eager to. Ultimately custom code is often needed for this sort of thing, code that exactly matches your content and your application. And that is far from easy.

Something I’ve seen on a few sites lately is really large textboxes on signup/sign in forms. I’m not sure how I feel about them. In most cases, sites have used this fairly effectively with only a few fields requiring entry. But when I’m on my 13″ Macbook Pro, I have to scroll to see the submit button at the bottom.

The other thing that large textboxes does is eliminate other possibilities for these pages, like using the sign up form as a qualifier. Joshua Porter, the author of that article also recently gave a presentation that has really inspired me lately. Highly recommended.