Apologies for this, it’s geeky and niche, but being part of a Manchester SEO I love it! The video is of the Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) and in this video he is rapping about “design coding”, where he gives advice and guidance on how to design a website with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), usability and conversion considerations in mind but in a hip hop song. Not only is it quite amusing, but the song isn’t half bad and some of the information is really quite accurate! For someone that doesn’t know anything about SEO, this could be quite a useful song in terms of learning the real basics.

The Poetic Prophet is well known in the online marketing industry, with this video alone having had about 581,000 hits. The popularity of his songs has meant that he has performed guest appearances at SEO and online marketing seminars and conferences across the United States. “Design coding” is just one of an entire album of songs covering many aspects of SEO, including link building, black hat techniques, PPC (pay per click) and much more. Crazy, eh? Imagine listening to that in your car for some SEO tips will driving to your meetings!

Just in case you’re interested, here are they lyrics to his song:

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it