Mar 29 2009
SEO Web Design
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is really just a bunch of guidelines you can follow when making a website or writing a post or an article. Abiding by these guidelines will create the conditions necessary for a site to be found when someone does a search on a specified term at Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engines.In my opinion Web Design encompasses a large area and is not exclusively in the realm of graphic manipulation. A real web designer knows HTML and CSS and is familiar with programming languages like PHP and JavaScript. Of course there is a need for knowledge of traditional design such as color theory, techniques in proper layout, organization of the content, type faces, and usability. Website accessibility for deaf and blind folks and mobile display are other skillsets one might add as well.
SEO Web Design then would be a wide range of techniques necessary for balancing search engine optimization and web design for the purpose of makeing websites that are nice to look at AND will be found in the search engine results pages.
In my opinion there are very few websites that actually deal with all of the above. It is no easy task considering cross browser and cross platform compatability issues.
Most people that make websites for a living have a dominant realm. There are web design artists who do the graphics, there are programmers who do the code and there are the SEO consultants. Left on their own they will produce amazing looking websites that don’t exist in the search engines and shoddy looking sites that will show up on page one on the desired search.
As a web designer myself, I have found that most people, in other professions, just don’t get the connection of how important SEO really is to their business and their efforts to have an internet presence.
Their biggest efforts are geared towards making a nice looking site that will properly represent their business. Colors must be perfect, layout is crafted with precision, and the copy is precise. However, even when all the colors are perfect and the layout is finished, and the messaging is exactly what they want they have most likely failed to take into consideration what words and phrases actually get searched on. If a company creates left handed wobbles and they have described their process and its intrinsic value but never mention the term “wobbles for the left hand,” which happens to get 2000 search queries a month, they are missing the boat. They are a mere five minutes of research and five minutes of text tweaking away from a successful website but instead they will wallow in obscurity with no idea why the site gets no traffic.
Another misconception I have seen again and again happens after someone hears about search engine optimization and without further research, goes about filling in the webpage elements such as the page title and the keyword meta tags all wrong. They’ll put the URL or the name of the company as the page title, a well thought out two or three sentences as the description, and some descriptive keywords and then proceed to put these on every page. This tactic not only misses the concept it actually hurts the site.
Even the most beautiful websites have to work the proper keywords if they owner wants to have any kind of lasting results. So after your designer is done and you’ve got a great design, use the Adwords Keyword Tool (Google It) to discover what words and phrases people actually search for that are related to your busines, service, or product then…
- Pick your sites main keyword.
- Find relevant, supporting, keywords.
- Place keywords in
- the page title
- the description meta tag
- the keyword meta tag
- the page header usinh the <h1> or <h2> tag
- at least twice in the page content.
- Don’t list keywords in the keyword meta tag that are not relevant to the page
That’s it really. Easy as pie.
This however WILL NOT catupult your site to the number one spot in the search engines. Your site will be poised for a great rank but to get there you need to do what is termed link building. A properly executed link building strategy WILL get you to page one but depending on how competative the keyword you choose is, it could take a lot of effort.
So, as you can see there is indeed a lot involved in SEO web design and no matter how great your site looks, design alone will not get people to your site, and that is what having a website is all about.
