BROADCASTS.com

There can be a feeling in the web development community that "SEO is evil" - Scott Gledhill cuts through the hype to focus on how developing accessible, standards compliant websites is the first step in creating search engine friendly websites - and also talks about what is being done in the industry to make websites more findable, sometimes at the cost of making them less usable. SEO is big business and it’s attracting a whole new breed of web practitioners into our industry. Learn the advantages that we have as web standards developers when it comes to the practice of search engine optimisation, as well as some of the disadvantages, and how to overcome them. We will discuss how to handle overzealous search engine marketers, how to find your way through the hype and buzzwords of the industry and, most importantly, how not to compromise your websites’ integrity, best practice development and usability when being confronted by SEO. Scott Gledhill is Web Technology Strategist at News Digital Media (NDM) in Sydney. He has lead several major redesigns of NDM websites, converting them from legacy table based layouts to standards compliant, accessible and search engine friendly websites. His current role involves strategy and education on search engine optimisation, accessibility and best practice web development across the broad network of NDM websites. Scott believes and practices a holistic approach of usability, design, development and findability, and communicates the end result across all areas of the business. Scott also moonlights as co-founder for molt:n digital, a Sydney based web consultancy. In his spare time he finds time to blog about SEO, accessibility and all things web standards on his website, standardzilla.com Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).