Yesterday one of my developers came into my office with an alternating puzzled and pained look on his face. He was holding an SEO report from an agency in Colorado retained by one of our clients. Ascentium is a full service interactive agency that crosses many disciplines. Not every engagement includes SEO. The Colorado SEO recommendations led off with removing all JavaScript from the pages and referencing through an include file. The site is heavily designed with DHTML navigation and this would be a monumental amount of work ...for no real benefit. Sure, no JavaScript on the page was a standard recommendations oh....three or four years ago (12 in Web years) and that was before the search engines started making some peace with JavaScript  and Web audiences became accustomed to the high functionality afforded by JavaScript. Checking the page in the Google text cache, all of the text and links are visible. Checking the page size finds it to be a lean, mean 48 KB. So what benefit is incurred from following advice whose shelf-life expired a long time ago? None and my blood started to boil.

I spend a lot of time keeping up on the advancements in search engine technology. I go to conferences, read books and articles in professional journals, both print and online, and read a lot of blogs with special emphasis on Searchengineland by Danny Sullivan, and SEO by the Sea by Bill Slawski and Cre*teasite SEO forums and more. It is important to give clients the most contemporaneous recommendations for Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and for every point-0 after that.

So, I wanted to share my 5 ways find out if the SEO advice you're getting as past its expiration date.

1. JavaScript is not the spawn of Satan. In fact, it is extremely useful and pervasive. This is why search engines are indexing more of it. If they can, we should. So, likely you do not have to remove that JavaScript from the page unless you page is nearing the indexable limit (around 512 KB and that is a lot of KB), you may want to move the JavaScript to the bottom of the page.
2. Flash is not evil. Again, search engines have made some peace with Flash. Adobe has published as Search SDK to optimize Flash app. Geoff Sterns over at Dconcept has presented a fine, low impact workaround in his A Modern Approach to Flash SEO. Modern, yes, that's the ticket and the point. AJAX and Silverlight are not tools of Al Qaeda. Microsoft has been extremely proactive and prescriptive on how to optimize Silverlight for search engine visibility.  Some solutions that we've employed here at Ascentium to great success are the <no script> or <div ID> to add a text version of the static content to the page.
3. The scroll is dead. If your SEO expert is talking about screen scrolls, remind them that we now have high speed access so for most, the 56K days are long gone. Server processing speed has gotten blazingly fast. Yes, people still do not want to read on the Web. However, they do print out, email URLs, bookmark online, post to social sites and more to consume resources from the Web. Search engines DO "read" on the Web in that they index the text and use that to form contextual patterns. The more content on the page, the more words in the index and the more opportunity to appear in search results. Paragraphs are good, scrolling will happen if there is something to scroll to below the now dead fold. And what's an oxymoronic newspaper term doing ruling Web content development anyway?
4.  Search engines are all about numbers; not punctuation. Most people do not spell or punctuate their search results correctly yet, according to the Pew Internet Study done in 2005, 70% of them are happy with search engines and get what they want out of them. So caps in the URL is not a value add and non-caps in the URL are not to be worried about
5. Context rules; in 2006, Google purchased the Orion Algorithm and this accelerated the change from a link-based SEO economy to a context-based economy.  That is SEO 2.0. Linking is about context not quantity these days. It is not possible to buy positioning in the precious top 20 with links on Lemontreedotcom lots-o-links pages. Mediocre links like that can actually hurt more than they help. Blended (or Universal) Search means optimizing images and sound as well as text. There is no standing still on the Web. What worked in 1999 does not necessarily work now. Search engines are getting freakishly sophisticated to compete with what Time magazine has referenced as a "buffet of distraction" for the customers. 

There are a lot of SEO firms out there that would like to return to the Web of old. It was much simpler then and did not require so much effort. However, I like the home page on the right much better than that of the left. I like the interactivity that Web 2.0 provides and eagerly await the arrival of Web 3.0 and all of the other Point0s to follow. I mean to be part of making sure that customers can still find what they are looking for by offering SEO 2.0 to my clients and hope that more of us SEO consultants sign on for the same.

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