Search engine optimization has pretty much everything to do with web design and development . . . or at least it should! In an era long gone, at least on the Internet time line, web designers operated on an aesthetic design level, not knowing and perhaps not interested in the traffic or marketing side.
From a artistic standpoint, one would argue that sacrificing visual design would impact the conversion of site visitors (conversion is essentially the desired action being taken – i.e. purchasing, subscribing, contributing). The rationale goes that if a visitor likes the site, enjoys looking at it and using it, then they’re more likely to purchase or do what it is that you want.
From a marketing standpoint, the law of numbers supersedes aesthetics and getting 10 times the visitors at a 20% conversion rate is better than getting a 100% conversion rate. In reality, a search engine optimized site could see many 100’s of times more traffic than one that receives no search engine traffic at all. And on the flip side, the 100% conversion goal isn’t probable.
So here we are in 2008 where SEO is a driving factor in site structure and design. Who are the participants and how does SEO get incorporated and at what stage. Well, the separation of designer and developer can exists, a dynamic more commonly seen on mid to high end projects where the budget affords both an “artist” and a “technician”. In this scenario, the two professionals work together to design and build an optimized site. For the small business however, the designer and developer are often one in the same and that individual needs to have a firm grasp of everything. If your survival depended on one or the other though, I would strongly argue that a mastery of SEO structure and techniques trump aesthetics.
Fortunately, the two disciplines can come together quite well. The overall quality of “design/developer” or “artist/technician” (the all-in-one professional) has improved significantly over the years—I happen to be one myself. At the same time, it’s important to know where one’s strengths lie. Not every project can be best served by the all-in-one professional. At that critical juncture, where need and budget dictate, specialists are brought together to deliver the goods.
Back to the small business though, where constraints rule the day. What should one demand of a full service web professional? Dave Davies summed it up pretty well in his article “Picking An SEO-friendly Web Designer.” Following are several excerpts:
Picking A Web Designer
There are two main considerations that you’ll need to make when you’re picking your web designer. The first is, can they build an attractive site and the second is can they build a search engine friendly site?
Building an attractive site:
When you’re choosing a designer take a look at their portfolio – put some of their designs past people in your target demographic and see what they think. It’s also wise to view the sites of the leaders in your industry to see what they’re doing (and maybe even who designed their sites). Just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s effective to your target market.
Building a search engine friendly site:
This is crucially important but probably one of the areas we have to address most frequently. I can’t possibly get into all the various areas of search engine friendly design so I’ll simply list off a couple of the most common issue we encounter and then provide references to other reading.
Enormous amounts of code on the page. For some reason, even some new designs are coming to us as though they were out of 1998 as far as the page code is concerned. All skilled web designers should have a solid grasp of CSS and should be putting all the main formatting into this file(s). Way too often we’re getting sites with dozens of font tags, color tags, size tags, etc. etc. etc. This just gives the search engines a lot more to dig through to find what they want – the content.
Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the keywords you’re targeting. In short, you need to link to them with text and you need that text to include the keywords. This isn’t some deep, dark mystery of SEO and has been well documented and commented on but we’ve seen tons of instances where internal links are image only or worse, an unspiderable script-based navigation system.
If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that’s fine. In fact, it’ll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily.
Over-optimized pages. I love seeing websites that were developed by a web designer who “knows SEO” and has stuffed so many keywords and header tags into the pages that it reads more like an eye chart than sales copy.
The day has come that search engines edge out Yellow Pages for local business searches. According to a study by TMP Directional Marketing, search engines have taken over Yellow Pages as the more popular way for people to look for local businesses, 31 to 30% respectively.
