What do web designers consider to be SEO
-
I'm putting together an article about Web Designers and SEO. The basic crux is that most designers will at most (if you are lucky) add in title tags, maybe pretty URL's and HTML links and call it SEO friendly. (lot's who don't probably but also lot's who are even worse)
Of course I want it to be a bit controversial so please feel free to let rip. My argument is clients who have previously had site's that have had "SEO on them", know think that all SEO is a waste of time as their previous experience didn't produce the traffic and sales they were expecting. I don't know many designers who independently consider a site marketing strategy and how a site is going to generate links in the long term.
I'm sure most of us have read this post on SEO responsiblities but becasue the first port of call for most business owners are the web designers, our offering is undermined by their misunderstandings and in some cases mis-sellings.
So under the working title, "Why Web Designers Are Bad For SEO", any care to share some imput.
-
Good article, but I like to think of myself as an exception, I have been a developer since the beginning of the internet. About 5 years ago I was working for a firm that wanted a developer to liaise with a SEO firm they had hired. I quickly found that the SEO’s had little knowledge of development and visa versa the developers had little knowledge of SEO. Since that time I have thought about building sites to rank from the ground up. The natural path of this pursuit led me to make fast lightweight sites, well organized with clear semantic clean coded html. I think you hit the nail on the head with the, what comes first argument. One really must do a lot of picking the brains of the site owners head, and find out just what they want the site to do. Often they really don’t know yet, but its not worth starting until they and you know what the final out come should be
-
Thank you everyone for helping out. The article has gone live at Sitepoint. http://www.sitepoint.com/why-seo-comes-first/ .
Hopefully you chaps agree with what's being said. Clearly I'm trying to get a bit of a rise from web developers but we shall see if they "bite" at all.
Thanks guys.
-
This is the problem eh, doing what we do often means undoing someone elses hardwork. But great point Eugene, the hadn't thought about the battle lines between our needs and the effects that can have visually.
-
Messing with his masterpeice.
-
I often have to tell clinets that they need a new site, no one wants here that, but i tell them straight, and point out that every so many extra sales will pay for it.
-
I do SEO work for a Web Designer with emphasis on the word "design". The issue that come up most often is the conflict between graphic design and content "text". designers want the site to look pretty, sometimes at the expense of content. Designers are happy when I mess with meta tags and link structure. Not so much when I want content added.
-
"their kids are ugly". Made me chuckle that.
Unfortunatley, I'm working at an agency and pretty much all their sites they built (who are now SEO clients) are "ugly". It's not obvious stuff to the uninitiated but stuff like canoncialized home pages, poor site architecture and not a drop of keyword research in site. Hey ho.
Point of my article is going to be that clients should approach an SEO/SEM first then do the web build and not the other way round. Fed up of people having a downer on SEO's becasue they've had some web desinger sell them SEO when they've not thought a jot about a long term marketing plan and they're annoyed that there brand new site hasn't made them a shed load of cash within a few months of being launched.
-
I can sympathise with you about trying to work though other developers,
Telling them there site is not perfect, is like telling them their kids are ugly.
I remember telling a client his web site was absolute crap, before I asked who made it for him, my wife was the answer, but we got past that awkward moment.
I only do SEO on sites I build myself, I am not interested in fixing problem sites that others were paid to make. -
I think Alan has laid out a lot in his response. One thing that I tell clients going in is that there is a thing called an SEO friendly site, meaning that it had some of the basic SEO work done, but SEO is not a static process. Because the web changes, because peoples needs and queries change, because the rules the search engines apply all change, the website must be capable of changing as well.
The issue you raise is not black and white though. I will tell you that my chief developer is an excellent developer and he will tell you he learned more about SEO upon coming to our firm than he did in his previous position of three years. His role was with a design firm. I cannot build a website beyond the most rudimentary and it would be ugly. He can and with the two of us working together we do a good to great job.
You cannot have a website that is a slave to a designer/developer where they must be called to do something each time you need a change. (Frankly, of all our clients we only have two where we work with outside developers any longer as it became too much of a hurdle to try and get changes made). So, CMS is a must for most sites. Many designers do not want to relinquish control and that is part of the rub with SEO. As you stated, if they already built the site, where does that leave you?
You must educate the client in the basics and how you are going to proceed. If you are at a hurdle: Client wants to know what's wrong since they are ranking first for "gasoline go kart engines route 6 Tampa, Fl." or client states we never ranked before this company and now we are number 2 on Google for NNNN. You have to ask them questions around keywords and be prepared to show them analytics, ask about ROI, etc.
One last thing and its a big one: Since you are speaking of web designers and SEO pros, if you are going into see a client for the first time...have a lot more questions than answers. Become the teacher that leads with questions.
Looking forward to the article.
-
It can be a good read.
Duane forrester is much more revealing than Matt Cutts, and he will return your comments and questions, well some of the time, Its very hard to get a answer out of matt. -
Alan,
Well done, thanks for the links to the bing blog. -
I consider everything on the page a SEO Factor. I agree with your comments
I hate the word Web Designer, I refer to me self as a computer programmer or maybe Web Developer, Web design while important comes last when building a site for SEO.
I believe that how you build a website is very important to SEO, getting a Wordpress site with all its problems and then going out and getting links is not a good way to rank. Its hard to change a badly built site, get it right from the start.
I have used this analogy a few times, but I will use it again.
If a fisherman has holes in his net, he has to do a lot more fishing than a man that does not.
If you have violations in your website then you have to do a lot more link-building than a man who does not.
Firstly I use ASP.MVC to create my sites, with its routing engine to create User friendly URLs and its very clean code gives to a head start from the beginning.Duane Forrester from Bing did a blog article on the order of things to do when building a site. The first 2 things were
Crawlability
Site structure
2 things very few sites consider.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/19/18-things-you-need-to-know-about-seo.aspxCrawlability is the big one, you need to get your site free from all Violations. I us the Bing SEO Toolkit to test my site, I have never found another site to get a perfect score, most sites have thousands to hundreds of thousands of violations, Alessandro Catorcini , Lead Program Manager, Bing API said the same thing on Whitboard Friday.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-interview-the-bing-teamSite structure, you need to know where you are pushing the link juice, each link changes the rank of all your pages, you need to think carefully when designing your site structure.
I like to keep my sites simple as possible for the main ranking pages, semantic markup, and using microdata to mark up entities into rich snippets, no bells and whistles, and no Flash
You must describe your content to the search engine.
Make the SE love crawling your site, clean descriptive code free from all violations.
Then you have content hierarchy followed by , keyword, on page factors and the other things i think we are all clear on.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Html4 menu system which is seo-friendly while moving to html5
I have a complex site and very large site that we are moving to html5 as quickly as possible given our resources (long overdue) but I was wondering if anyone knew of a menuing system that would work on mobile that is seo-friendly in terms of do-follow and does not use javascript that the spiders often cannot read. We need code/css that works for both the menu and for select boxes. I know few write such code anymore, and the idea is dated, but it is a temporary stopgap while we move to HTML5 when such tools are available. Does any such code, free or commercial, exist anymore? Thank you in advance as this is very important in terms of not usuing too much mobile real estate with side menus... Best regards
Web Design | | gheh20130 -
Looking for live web examples of Medical schema
Has anyone seen a hospital system or medical clinic properly employ schema markup to their sites? This seems like very new territory, and we want to do it right by our client. Are there any best practices I need to look out for?
Web Design | | Madgenius3 -
Does Google penalize duplicate website design?
Hello, We are very close to launching five new websites, all in the same business sector. Because we would like to keep our brand intact, we are looking to use the same design on all five websites. My question is, will Google penalize the sites if they have the same design? Thank you! Best regards,
Web Design | | Tiberiu
Tiberiu0 -
What are the top 3 things you evaluate when contracted to SEO a website?
As a freelancer, what are the top 3 things you evaluate when contracted to SEO a website for a client?
Web Design | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0 -
Looking for an open source or wordpress designer that knows seo best practices
I have almost lost my patience in trying to find a web developer for our project. I have searched high and low from freelancers to us based firms. All I can find; freelancers that can't get the job done, but promise they can and us based firms that are currently getting away with murder charging through the nose on work that is not acceptable to say the least. US based Firms 1. Seem to give you as little work as possible to increase their margin. I get it we all need to make money. 2. Everyone knows how to do everything until you start telling them that you have a little education in the industry and will be testing their work. All of the sudden they no longer talk to you. 3. Got a few recommendations and they are all subpar performers. After asking them why their builds load so slow or have so many errors they have excuses that point to the customer Freelancers over seas. 1. I am not sure where to start with this. I have searched high and low in freelancer for someone that I can trust to build a site. Of course there is a ton of junk to look through. After countless hours of narrowing down the individuals I am thinking of giving a shot I find that they are not capable of the job. All I want is a new website from a firm that is honest and knows what they are doing. That is educated in seo best practices. That can build a quality website and actually has references of sites they built that are still up and running and test out alright. It is pretty bad when web development companies miss simple items like h tags. Really? Does anyone know of someone that knows what they are doing? That can work with someone that knows how to run a dvd player. Just disappointing to see all these web companies and freelancers that get away with murder. Who earns their keep in this industry?!?!?!?
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments0 -
Need an SEO pro to build us a new fine art website
Hey Seomoz friends My friends and I started buying and selling art 5 years ago. We did it all on ebay. Two years ago I decided to try an attempt at building us a website to further our business outside of ebay. www.originalartbroker.com I used homestead.com software aka intuit to do this. I was able to get a lot of first page results in seo after a ton of work and willing to do a lot more. I'm sure the homestead site slowed my efforts down. I need more power 🙂 What we do. We sell fine art. We are trying to aspire to the leading seller of fine contemporary art online. We will do whatever it takes to get there. Our issue is not our product. Our issue is getting traffic to the site. I only have 175-200 visitors a day. I need better results for the keywords of our artists and inquires that surround them. We have a bounce rate of 70%, average time on site of 1 minute 50 seconds, and a slow loading site that is almost impossible to create individual pages for pieces (mgmt nightmare) Outside of our site we have blogs, squidoo pages, facebook account with 2500 fans, twitter page with 2k followers, youtube channel, and a blog on the site for new arrivals. We have a 200-250 piece on our site at any given time. We add probably ten pieces on average a week. We don't need any kind of ecommerce management software as most of our sales are done over the phone being that it is higher end art. I need a site that out performs my competition. I need to be in the top three when someone types in "leroy neiman" "peter max" and so on. I, with limited knowledge, need to be able to use the software everyday to upload new art as it comes in. I want every piece to have its own page so that I can also add pieces to a google merchant account. When I add new pieces under a certain artists and it creates its own page i want it to create h tags and an url extension for each product as I add them based off the discription and artists name. I would like some sort of blog integration to post our new arrivals as we get them. I would like some sort of customer capture. I am thinking something along the lines of them prociding email, name, and zip code to see the prices on the site. You are the seo pro so you know what it takes. I would like to know what a solution would cost to get us on the ground with more seo power. A site with speed that is easily indexed. It doesn't need to have a lot of bells and whistles. Please look at my site and let me know what you think. You can get an idea from that of what we are doing. Please give me an idea of what you can do and what it would cost. Thank you
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments0 -
Old links in Google, new website affecting SEO?
Hi Guys, I have launched my website in october and it has already been indexed by google. Now I'm going to launch my redesign which comes with a new structure, content, links, etc. So the question is, do I have to resubmit my website to google to get rid of old links? Onsite Explorer shows links to my forum which has been spammed with p* stuff which has been already indexed as well. The forum is off now. I want to use SEOmoz to track my new website but I guess this could be a hard thing as old links etc will be shown as well. Is there any tool to let Google know about my changes? Does it affect my SEO in any way? Thank you for your help. Nick
Web Design | | NickITW0