About Jane and Robot

The site is for anyone interested in foundational elements of search engine optimization, but is geared for web developers. If you love to code and want to add key design patterns to your skill set that help bring your web application to your potential audience, this site is for you.

Why Jane and Robot

Many web developers we talk to think they have to choose between usability and search engine optimization. But nothing could be further from the truth. Good SEO principles make the site more usable for visitors, and when you build a site that focuses on the user, you automatically are building a site that search engines are interested in. By building a site for both Jane and robots, you are creating something better for both of them than you could by focusing on only one of them.

• Designing for users is about more than creating a pretty site. It’s ensuring visitors on mobile phones, screen readers, slow connections, and older browsers can access the content. It’s making the content the star, rather than the technology. Building these considerations into your site helps search engine robots crawl, index, and rank the site as well.
• Being smart about search engine robots is making sure you aren’t keeping your front doors locked to search engines and ensuring that those bots can access all of the content, understand it, and rank it. Of course, optimizing a site for search engines in a way that doesn’t consider users can turn those users away, and that would defeat the whole purpose of search engine optimization.Fortunately, you don’t have to choose. Jane and Robot is all about design patterns that please both Jane and robots.
• Long-lasting success? Search engine optimization that focuses on the user experience builds long term value in search engines. It doesn’t make use of tactics that stop working as soon as the search engines change their algorithms and it doesn’t employ shady techniques that search engines seek out and penalize. Search engines algorithms are designed to find the best results for users, so the key is to create a compelling experience for your visitors in a way that ensures search engines can find you.95% of those on the internet use search engines. Unlike lots of advertising, search traffic is free and targeted, and it tends to be well trusted. By designing your web applications within the framework of understanding how search engines work, you can connect with more customers who are seeking out what you have to offer.

Why we started the site

We started this site because we’ve talked to a lot of web developers (our friends, when we speak at conferences, through email we get) who know that search is important, but are overloaded with information about SEO — much of it suspect. The SEO industry tends to have a bad rap because of all the black hat tricks intended to manipulate search engines as well as the techniques that ignore the user and seem to forget that users are the whole reason for the site in the first place. And SEO often focuses on the marketer and puts marketing in direct conflict with the web developer.

We know that effective search engine optimization doesn’t have to be manipulative and ignore the user. It can be a key tenet in web application development, along with functionality and usability. And when infrastructure is designed with SEO in mind, the developer and marketer can work hand in hand rather than be at odds with each other.

Who we are

We’ve been involved with web design and development since the mid-90s and have more recently worked for major search engines, building tools and community for website owners and developers. We speak regularly at search and developer-related conferences and are particularly interested in the intersection of code and search.

Vanessa Fox is the founder of Nine by Blue, which looks at the relationships between development, SEO, and online marketing silos and how the data from each of these areas can be used holistically to learn more about customer behavior. She has been researching business needs and developing strategies for effective use of this data as an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners. Vanessa is also features editor at Search Engine Land, a leading online journal covering the search industry. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search. She’s been building web sites since 1995 and spent a number of years writing SDK documentation.

Nathan Buggia is currently lead program manager for the Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft’s suite of tools designed to help website owners get better results from Live Search. Nathan has spent a decade working in almost every aspect of web technology since his first professional web development job in 1997. Since then he as continued web development work, systems administration, systems architecture, online marketing, search, and robot-drawing.