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
-
How does lazy load effect SEO?
One of my clients implemented lazy load on part of the navigation and I am wondering what the effects will be. Specifically, the drop-down navigation does not load until you hover over it. That means when you look at the page source that drop down navigation is no longer there. I am wondering if that means the google bot no longer sees the links in the navigation drop down. I am looking into this because the dev department of this company is going to do what it wants to and they need proof that its a bad move. I already suspect that it is. Too early to tell what the effects will be and not sure if there is a built-in delay in the algorithm as to when it will impact rankings. Ultimately, I am wondering if my belief that if you can't see it in the page source then as far as that particular page goes it is not seen. That would be an important thing to verify as being true.
Web Design | | KentH0 -
Any new tips on how to speed up re-listing after re-design?
A few things around re-designing an older but well performing site for search and retaining/ improving SEO value. Lots of effort has been put into content marketing and optimising individual pages on this site, it has a lot of links coming in from well-respected sites (but the domain name will remain the same so that shouldn't be an issue) so I'm very anxious about how the redesign will effect ranking, although the new site will be far more user friendly, beautiful, responsive where the old one is not and faster to load. Would really like to avoid the search engine drop when the site first goes live if at all possible- One idea on this was to make the new site live on another domain - .co.uk for example, whilst keeping the old site up on the .com for a month or so, then switching the records so the new site is then visible on .com and the .co.uk redirects to it. Does this sound at all sensible?! Also any more advice on how best to ensure the new site will do better, not worse for search is hugely appreciated. We have cut a lot of content to make it more user friendly and easy to find information. We will be making sure all old links are redirected to new site (but as there are fewer pages on new site, will it matter if 5 old URLS point to one new URL for instance?) Also what's the difference between 301 and 302 redirects! Thank you so much in advance, massively appreciated your time!
Web Design | | Emjmoz0 -
Best Practices for home page design for ecommerce website
I know this question is not directly related to SEO, but I figured I have been getting some good help from this forum, so why not? The website is www.vrtack.com. I am looking to redesign the home page. It is an ecommerce website selling equestrian clothing and leather goods. My goals are: 1. Reduce the very high bounce rate and drop-off rate. 2. Fine tune the relevancy of the website towards a handful of keyword phrases. 3. Engage the visitor to create better click-through and to increase the average time spent on the page/site. 4. Page Loading time is of importance. It has to load quickly. I would love to hear some specific suggestions, examples, best practices.
Web Design | | amitramani0 -
Script tags and seo
Hi, I have a page on my site with a google map embed, and a path drawn on the map. The path is made from a long string of coordinates. For ease I have the co-ordinates placed in a script tag at the foot of the page, amongst my javascript My question is, will this script tag hurt the seo for the page? I've read that inline js and 'data islands' can be bad, so I've been careful to keep it out of the main body of the page. Thanks, any help appreciated!
Web Design | | madegood0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Over Optimization & Footer Links for Crediting Web Design to a Company
With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | JoshGill270 -
What are some good places to read about SEO with Joomla CMS?
I recently was asked by a potential client to work with them on Joomla based website. I very rarely come across people with Joomla based websites and am struggling to find good resources outside of Joomla's own community site. At this point, I am not very comfortable working with them on Joomla. Any tips or advice?
Web Design | | GCSMasone0 -
What can this charity site do to improve SEO?
Hello wise ones, We have been working with the charity Volunteers of America to create a new site for their car donation program at carshelpingpeople.org They are a national charity with extensive local programs run by regional affiliates, so the site is divided into a small national section linked to Regional Affiliate sections. You get to the regional sections either by entering your zip code or clicking on your state in the bottom nav of the national pages. Right now we have developed regional sections for Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Delaware and the Philadelphia area. The site is about 2 1/2 months old, and while our conversion rate is pretty good (7%) our organic search ranking isn't improving as quickly as we'd like to see. Car donation is a very competitive space, and we would appreciate any advice on how to improve the SEO of the site. Thanks so much.
Web Design | | Phibnax0