The Venture Skills Blog

Its time to do a more in depth write up on Drupal and SEO there have been several floating around recently and hopefully this will help tie down the various ideas that have been floating around. But lets start with some of the simple bits like…

Getting past the deadly sins

I wrote a short article on the Deadly sins of SEO websites these sins were on the whole received well by readers though one blogger did I feel miss the point of the article (Though his follow up post is a remarkable piece of work and well worth a read! I love his idea of me on an ego trip), but to summarize these are the major sins I feel are committed by some companies and we all have done them in the past to which in my mind there are no excuses partly as some of them are legality and partly because they are common sense. Here they are:

• No Alt attribute in image tags
• Use of tables for design
• Not using heading tags
• Images instead of text
• Failure to declare a doctype
• failure to declare a language
• Not using robot.txt or htaccess files to control spiders (and people)

Now people added several others including sitemaps, keywords in titles etc, but I initially want to concentrate on the Deadly sins. Luckily there is almost nothing that we need to do as Drupal has done most of the work for us, our template is CSS tableless design, we use alt tags as part of the standard practices built into Drupal (Though with the logo extra data was hard coded to give it a more accurate title) The doctype is declared correctly and it automatically picks up a language (Again we overrode this by declaring the language in the template though this is not needed it just happens we did this time) So the only real issue is when dealing with robot.txt and Htaccess files.

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