Design & SEO: How to Make Sure You’re Getting What You Pay For

Over the past decade Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become inextricably linked to online marketing. However, knowing the concepts underlying SEO is important to more than just marketers. Most of the responsibility for executing good SEO actually falls to a site’s designer(s) or design team, so making sure designers are familiar with the principles of SEO is a big priority.

The Benefits of SEO

A site that fails to adapt to meet the requirements of search engine bots, or “spiders,” might find itself losing traffic, not to mention the massive opportunity cost of missed chances like appearing on search engine results pages. Backlink referrals and direct URL access aside, being found through search engine results is the only way your website can be found by other people.

As a designer, or when managing design, consider user accessibility as a broad issue. If people, your target audience especially, can’t find your site easily and then make convenient use of it, then the site is a failure from a design standpoint. SEO is an important part of good design for a modern website.

How to Get the Spider’s Attention

Search engines like Google and Yahoo! make use of “spider” or “web crawler” programs to crawl the web, reading and collecting content, following internal and external links, and finally bringing that information to the search engine’s database, or index. Crawlers move from page to page, determining relevance, relatedness, popularity, and other factors in order to create the most useful results pages possible.

When search engine users query their engine of choice, that search engine’s purpose is to create for the user a list of the results most relevant to their search. This is accomplished by building indexes through web crawling. What defines a search engine’s relative quality is how well and thoroughly in answers your questions. Complex algorithms built with crawler data determine result relevance and irrelevance based on factors like number of backlinks, page traffic, etc. How well your site performs in these areas determines its relative ranking on the search engine’s results pages.

What You Can Do As a Search Engine Optimizer

Search engines have different page-ranking algorithms, but gaining an understanding of the general principles underlying these algorithms is a good way to start influencing your position in results page rankings. This is, in brief, the service SEO experts are hired to perform. A search engine optimizer’s job, more generally, is often broken down into two categories: On-Site SEO and Off-Site SEO.

On-Site SEO is, as its name suggests, the group of things related to SEO that can be accomplished within the home site itself. Target keywords, internal linking to achieve greater relevance, streamlining site structure, and HTML markups are just a few examples of On-Site SEO. Off-Site SEO, by contrast, is a field over which much less direct control can be exercised. The number of backlinks your site has, how many people visit or link to your site.

This kind of attention comes as a result of good On-Site SEO, and it’s with an eye toward achieving those results that you should proceed with your SEO business model. Designing an appealing, navigable site will get you the exposure you need organically.

Common SEO Mistakes in Design and Development

1. Splash Pages are a very common mistake made by internet professionals of all types. You’ve probably seen it before: a great big banner image with a “Click Here to Enter” embedded in the image. Links embedded in Flash objects, however, can’t be accessed by spiders, and thus function as dead ends for web-crawling bots. Don’t cut your site off like this. Any designer who’s even heard of SEO should know to avoid this mistake.

The homepage is almost invariably a site’s highest-ranked page, and thus gets repeat-crawled most frequently. Without a homepage that links easily to the rest of the site, your site misses out on any kind of comprehensive crawling whatsoever. That’s fine if you’ve got no interest in a high search engine result ranking, but otherwise it’s a pitfall to avoid.

2. Flash menus, particularly animated menus, are a popular web tool crippled by the inability of spiders to interact with them. They might look great to you, but search engines won’t find them and thus won’t follow their links. The same goes for image and Flash content containing important keyword information. Target keywords should stay in text form or else they won’t be doing you any good.

3. Ajax is a common tool for constructing navigation interfaces for websites, but because it’s loaded dynamically it isn’t configured for spidering or indexing by search engines. While Ajax shouldn’t be counted out (it is a useful tool, and proper applications can be impressive to visitors), it should be kept in mind that it isn’t a great way to achieve SEO.

4. Title Tag missteps are easy to make. Often, develops make the mistake of titling every page within a site similarly, or even identically. This prevents spiders and search engines from evaluating which pages of your site are most relevant. In effect, it sends the message that your page is severely redundant. It may even cause spiders to index your site as web spam, which is obviously something to be avoided if at all possible. Keep title tags diverse and informative.

5. A little piece of information that often escapes designers is the fact that almost all major web crawlers are configured to process only the header and a small sampling of a given body of text. If you don’t get your desired info out in the first fifty to sixty-five characters, you run the risk of being classified as irrelevant for not getting to a recognizable point quick enough. Slapping keywords right in the titles and headers of pages and posts is the best way to get around this.

6. Keyword density and keywording are terms that get thrown around quite often, but a little goes a long way. When designing your title tag make sure you steer away from looking like a boutique window crammed full of eye-grabbing keywords. This technique, known as keyword stuffing, usually results in the classification of a website as spam: not good for you. Instead of saying, for instance, “Computing Skills and Computer Techniques for the Modern Computing Professional” you should stick to simple and explanatory titles. Example: Computing Tips. It pays to be concise when you’re dealing with crawlers.

The How’s & How-Not-To’s of SEO

1. Staying on top of who your audience is, what they want, and how that changes over time is all part of running any business and it factors directly into the design decisions you’ll have to make as they relate to SEO. Conducting polls, keep abreast of what’s happening on forums related to your topic or brand, do a little keyword research with Google’s keyword tools suite or a similar program. Scope out the lay of the land and you won’t be disappointed by the results. Remember, at the end of the day you’re building sites for consumers, not spiders.

2. Avoiding keyword stuffing doesn’t mean you should avoid keywords. In fact, keywords and keyword density are some of your best tools in the endeavor to get and maintain prominence on the internet. When designing a site, make sure keywords appear at all important locations: title tag, URL, main heading, and the first paragraph of content, and the body of any content are all locations you should target. A good rule of thumb is to try for 2% keyword density (two keyword instances per hundred words), but if your keyword is long or unusual, lessening the rate can improve the quality of the content.

3. Stay consistent with your message. Imagine that this article veered suddenly into a discussion of antique automobile collecting. Readers would be thrown off, the tone upset, the article’s impact greatly lessened or negated. Stay in your subject’s neighborhood to avoid alienating consumers and creating an impression of greedy short-sightedness. Quality should always come first when you’re building and maintaining your website, and if your interests broaden then branching out into new Web venues is preferable to incorporating unfamiliar material into your current site.

4. Broken links are a pox on the internet. They’re everywhere, forgotten and gathering dust in the corners of a million websites. They’re unavoidable inside a dynamic Web environment. Pages get moved or removed, sections are deleted or updated. They foster an image of sloppiness. Imagine running a corner store with a broken front window and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the impression you’re sending. However, that’s not to say that broken links can’t be removed as a problem. Simple attention to detail can prevent spiders from classifying your site as poorly-maintained.

You Pay for What You Get

If you’re hiring out of house for SEO design, don’t go cheap. Research your options, consult with similar businesses as to the strategies they’ve pursued, and be discerning! Remember that your website is your storefront on the internet, and its quality and draw are directly linked to the success of your endeavors online.

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