Recently a client of mine hired a search engine optimization (SEO) company to help get their site optimized for search engines. What blows me away is that sometimes practices that may help in ranking a little bit blow the crud out of usability. One recommendation the company made was to use images and have ‘alt’ attributes to help increase ranking. However, the client’s site is already heavy on the graphics and so if they add more images they will actually increase the download time so much that users will need a personal vacation to the water cooler, a trip to the bahamas or maybe could serve a life sentence in San Quentin before the thing loads up.

If you want to get good search engine ranking, do yourself a favor, hire a designer who knows symantic markup, get a nice design that folks might just link to for the appearance, and keep it clean. Write good content that the search engines will eat up, people will link to, and that informs actual readers of valuable information. None of what I’m writing here is new, revolutionary or a secret, however, SEO firms insist on magical markup and stupid hacks. Wake up folks!