Technical SEO Ryan Smith, SEO Programmer on search engine friendly web development – HackingSearch.com

I’m confirmed for the HTML, CSS and Hosting panel at WebmasterWorld PubCon South in Dallas on April 13-15, where I’ll be in excellent company discussing a variety of technical issues relevant to professional webmasters.

I’m looking forward especially to the Q&A to follow our presentations, as this level of technical discussion is under-served at PubCon and this broad topic will inevitably inspire a wide-ranging conversation with fellow web geeks.

There’s still time to save a hundred bucks off the door price at PubCon, and there’s probably still group-rate rooms at the DoubleTree too (call in to get it), so come on down (over? up?) to Dallas and join in the conversation with approachable experts of every kind.

See you there!

The game sure is changing.  Though it often feels like a captor-hostage situation, and for some accompanied by a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, Google and its nearly pathetic (if precedent) runners-up in the search market have opened up new ways of tweaking your site’s presentation in their search results.  It used to be that all you could customize was the title and the description snippet, simply by writing a smart title tag and an even more enticing meta description tag, but that was it.

If you haven’t heard of Yahoo’s Searchmonkey project, well now you never will because the great behemoth of underpaid, overworked and perpetually-pampered Python programmers of Mountain View have done roughly the same thing Yahoo started a year ago , just for 80% more users than Yahoo’s ever going to have.  They call it Rich Snippets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow in charge of their Search Quality Group, just posted a killer entry on the official Google Blog describing their IR philosophy. The first thing that jumps out at the casual SEO reading this is emphasized in bold below:

Read the rest of this entry »