Back in the early to mid 2000s, I learned web design/development by volunteering to create websites for charities/NGOs. In the process, I
* ensured that the code (HTML and CSS, only basic non-AJAX, JavaScript) was standards-compliant (at the time, XHTML [1] was “the big thing”)
* implemented basic usability guidelines as advocated by Jakob Nielsen [2] in his Alertbox newsletter and
* followed Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions in his Dive Into Accessibility
Carrying out the above and simply focussing on quality content was enough to rank highly in Google’s search engine results and I never had the need nor inclination to do any research into SEO. Back then the mantra in the web development books was that “content is king” – and Google reflected this philosophy. Sadly, the Web has changed a lot in the intervening years.
* ensured that the code (HTML and CSS, only basic non-AJAX, JavaScript) was standards-compliant (at the time, XHTML [1] was “the big thing”)
* implemented basic usability guidelines as advocated by Jakob Nielsen [2] in his Alertbox newsletter and
* followed Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions in his Dive Into Accessibility
Carrying out the above and simply focussing on quality content was enough to rank highly in Google’s search engine results and I never had the need nor inclination to do any research into SEO. Back then the mantra in the web development books was that “content is king” – and Google reflected this philosophy. Sadly, the Web has changed a lot in the intervening years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consu...
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20110927131211/http://diveintoac...