I’ve seen numerous posts where people have claimed that good clean HTML leads to better SEO rankings. I’ve even talked about the lie that of the link between SEO and valid HTML.

I’ve yet to see any studies done which verify this claim and in fact I’ve even seen evidence to the opposite effect being true. I pointed out how in some competitive markets, the higher the ranking for the site the worse the validation recently in another post. This does not mean that poor code relates to higher rankings – just that valid HTML code doesn’t correlate to better rankings as some people would like to say, just like good clean code doesn’t mean the site will look better to visitors.

Matt Cutts recently did a short video on why Google’s own code doesn’t validate. (video opens new window – not allowed to embed)

Now does this mean that you should only have your web designers write invalid code – not, but it does mean you shouldn’t waste unnecessary time on it either.

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• Google Says Pages That Validate Do Not Get Ranking Boost (seroundtable.com)

Popularity: 4% [?]

About a year ago, Google release their own browser, Chrome.  They been hard at work updating it, wanting to take more of the browser market share.

They built a good browser for power users, if you didn’t mind not having the extensions you’ve come to love and expect in Firefox.

Well now they are adding some of those extensions as well as other improvements. Read the official release here.

Popularity: 4% [?]

What would you do if you found out one of your best sales people was randomly turning away 1 out of every 5 people?  People who might have bought from you, but the salesperson  turned them away because of their own prejudices.

Recently I was on a conference call with a client, and one of the services he was using. We were trying to work through some issues  and during the discussion one of the issues that came up was that the services site was designed to run in Internet Explorer only.

I can understand if you are running an Intranet, inside a company where the browser is dictated by IT, but for a public website, you are essentially turning away 1 out of every 4 or 5 customers.

So I ask again could you imagine your  bank, grocery store, or gas station or your store randomly turning away 1 out of every 5 customers because they drove a mini-van instead of a car to get to the store? Of course not! That salesperson should and probably would be fired for such foolishness!

Web browsers are like cars in many ways. They are the vehicle which your customer uses to get to your website. Just because Internet Explorer holds 80% of the market share, doesn’t mean that it should be the only browser you allow your customers to use. Your site should be designed to work with all modern browsers – and if it doesn’t you should fire your web designer.

(Note: names withheld to protect the guilty.)

Popularity: 2% [?]

This summer I’ve been working on several projects with two of them being very large.  Well I just finished the first large project, Our Wedding Circle. Built using an existing framework, so it should be easier to maintain, there is also large sections of custom code and several key updates.

The updates, allow for, as all websites should:

• easier administration to add/update/and disable users,
• faster searching for users than before,
• more optimized database structure, and
• improved findability for search engines, so it should rank higher than it’s predecessor.

The client brought me their ideas, and I worked with them and showed them some others things which could be done to make managing a site of their size more manageable.

The site is huge already with many wedding vendors from all over the US, indexed by location and category and is growing daily. Sites have to designed with growth in mind, or they will fail, and this site is a perfect example of one which is growing as it should.

Popularity: unranked [?]