16/08/2007
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This presentation outlines how web design and web development disciplines other than SEO are related to, and might be integrated within, your overall SEO strategy. The main focus of the argument is upon which approaches to web design and development might assist your SEO campaign and which will be a detriment to it.
What I aim to achieve here, is to guide those responsible for implementing web design or ecommerce projects towards an understanding of what they need to consider, in order to promote search engine visibility, and to avoid the design and development options that will render SEO campaigns unviable.
Good graphic design practices, HTML coding, copywriting practices and ecommerce development techniques, are mission critical to the ultimate search engine visibility of your web design project - get them wrong and you may find that you cannot optimise your site effectively.
I cannot emphasise enough that treating each stage of the development cycle as isolated and discrete from the other stages is a surefire way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory when it comes to marketing your website.
It is common practice to divide up the various stages of a web design project into design, development, implementation and SEO, with little or no interaction or collaboration taking place between the specialists responsible for each stage. The SEO person is usually the very last person to get his hands on the site after everyone else has done their bit.
Collaboration, however, is the key to success. If your designer or developer don’t talk to your SEO person, and gain insight into the design requirements from his view point, then it is likely that they will adopt an approach that undermines your search engine marketing campaign. What looks to be the right decision to take from a design and development angle, might actually be exactly the wrong decision to take as part of a successful SEO campaign.
A designer may produce a beautiful Photoshop website template for you, which seduces you into using it on its aesthetic merits alone and upon the principle that 'it looks good therefore it will be successful.'
Unfortunately this is not the case. There are many pretty websites out there making no money at all, and many quite ugly ones quietly turning over a fortune.
In order to avoid your site becoming an example of the former, there are two main options that you have available for your web design project:
Designers and developers, copywriters and SEOs need to collaborate and to communicate effectively during planning and risk management.
Don't let your Photoshop designer dominate the entire project. Stunning graphics and animations can reduce your potential for decent search engine rankings if you don’t employ some risk management and get your SEO guy involved early on. At very least ensure that plenty of white space is left for content, that menus and headings use text rather than graphics and that the design is extensible and scaleable, so that you can keep adding and editing content and web pages without impacting detrimentally upon the appearance or layout.
Most importantly, get your SEO specialist, coders and copy writers to give input into the specifications. This may save you a lot of extra work and delays further on.
How to prevent your graphic designer from dominating the web design project
Designing your website in Photoshop first is the wrong way around; although this is the most common graphic design practice.
Limit your graphics: design the graphics around the content, not vice versa.
Opt for a template designed in HTML first, whereby the textual content takes priority and is put in place before the graphics. Leave islands within the page for the graphics to fit, and let the designer come to it after the architecture of the site has been put into place. This way, the graphic designer does not have an unwarrented level of control over the direction of the whole project, but a proportional role which reflects the fact that your developers, copywriters and seo experts also have significant roles to play. Moreover, this way, the graphic designer can not inadvertantly undermine your SEO campaign.
Flash design - don't do it
SIMPLY THAT - JUST DON'T DO IT, EVER!
Search engines need words and Flash doesn't provide them with any. Simply do not under any circumstances ever opt for a web page which is nothing but Flash, and especially not an entry or landing page. There are numerous Flash designers out there touting themselves as website designers when they are actually nothing of the sort. Don’t use them. Your site will be invisible to search engines and you will have wasted your money.
“I heard that search engines might soon be able to read text in Flash sites”, I hear you say. My answer: Yeah, so, and? If you've gone for a Flash-orientated approach, the chances are that your site is lacking in content of any relevance to search engines anyway. Think again.
Files and folders: Naming your web pages (files) and folders using contextually relevant keywords is good for the logical organisation of your web site's architecture and will assist greatly in the future administration of your website; especially as it grows larger. These are also keywords that will sit in the internal hyperlinks of your site, so a well-organised web site with logically named files and folders will make a small contribution to your SEO and your inherent search engine visibility.
Entry pages to your website make no logical sense whatsoever. Why, when your visitor has found your website through Google or elsewhere do you want to put another barrier between him/her and the content that you are so eager for them to read?
It's just indulgence in theatrical gesturing which says “hello, this is our website please come in”. This sort of affected nonsense does nothing to impress your reader/visitor and immediately gives the impression that there is something artificial and contrived about your website. It does anything but convey the notion that this is a place where you are likely to find useful information or products and services.
I remember seeing a few tutorials on Frames about 5 or 6 years ago. One was entitled “Frames, why not to use them”, the next, “Frames, more reasons why not to use them” and the last one “Frames, please just don’t do it”. Web designers and SEO people have known for at least ten years that frames absolutely cripple the visibility of web pages for search engines. And yet, some designers still persist in using them, and web design customers continue to accept them. I even got a spam email the other week from someone claiming to have a “revolutionary, cutting-edge web marketing solution”. I looked at his website – Frames!
If you do want to include inserts in a web page, then check out the <iframe> tag. Its much more SEO friendly.
Good HTML/CSS coding practices can make optimising your site significantly easier, especially if you don't have a content management system.
Control as much formatting as possible with CSS stylesheets so that your source code is clean and the text within is easy to read and edit. This will mean that you have less code and more HTML, as a rough rule of thumb this is something that search engines prefer.
Take full control of your formatting centrally, so that you can take better control of your content.
Examples given on the next page...
Use structural HTML code that you can manipulate with CSS (Cascading Stylesheets), so that you can assign a logical relevance to your text for first and second level headings, lists and important text within paragraphs. e.g.
<h1 class="myclass1">an important heading with important information in it.</h1>
<h2 class="some_really_important_body_text">Some really important body text that I want the search engines to pay particular attention to.</h2>
Notice in these examples that both tags use a CSS class for all the formatting. There is no "style=", "align=center", superfluous span tags or any other extraneous junk clogging up the copy. It is clean and easy to edit.
In order to optimise your website for search engines the code needs editing. There is no way of getting around this, you need to be able to handcode your site if you are to achieve the levels of granularity and precision necessary to get your chosen keywords ranking well.
Unfortunately, many web designers only ever use software such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage, or other Rapid Application Development tools. Because they rely so heavily on this software, they often never even bother to look at the code. Such programming and coding lego does their thinking for them, and they have absolutely no idea about the backend quality of their work. I like to think of this as ‘Vapid Application Development’. In short, don't take control of the code and gain intimacy with it, and you probably won't score with the search engines – its that simple.
A high level of success at Search Engine Optimisation is usually a good indication of a website that has a very high quality of content. Sometimes this is because a site has snuck into a high place through a bit of luck and volume of rich copy, but more often than not it is because the sort of webmaster who spends time and effort over solid search engine techniques does so because he wants to get the quality content that he has researched, written and edited seen by as many people as possible, and because with quality copy he has an excellent platform upon which to build his SEO campaign.
The sort of content that has stickiness and retains visitors is essential to your success, and this means research, writing and editing.
The debate rages over whether copy is still king or whether backlinks are now more important to an SEO campaign. One thing for certain, however, is that backlinks will not persuade people to spend time reading through your site. Content and information are what will keep them there and keep them interested.
Don't think of them as visitors – they are not dropping by for a cup of tea and a chat.
Don't think of them as viewers – they are not aesthetes or voyeurs.
Think of them as readers – people come to your site looking for information and that is what they expect to find – relevant information.
Web design is not a descendant of the photo album, it is a descendant of the printing press, and uses many of the same conventions, measures and standards (point sizes, ems, type faces, lorem ipsum filler e.t.c.). This is why graphics orientated websites are often invisible to search engines by design, because the designers simply don't grasp that they are working with a medium designed for print, text, copy, content, words. Nice graphics are fine, but they should not impinge upon the true purpose of a web page - to convey textual information.
Focus: when writing for the web, focus is the most important thing to aim for. Don’t dilute your content. Sticking to one subject/topic on each web page will significantly help you to obtain the high rankings you desire.
Flitting between a dozen different subjects, failing to signpost your topic with relevant headings and using general rather than specific language will have the opposite effect.
Relevancy: Get to the relevant bits of your argument straight away. One good way to do this is the write your copy first and then work out the most suitable headings to fit that copy.
The same goes for introductory text. Write the body of your article or web page first and then go back and write the opening when you know clearly what your line of argument or main points are.
Synonyms: repeating your key points and ideas using different words to get the concepts across is a great way to bring in a little additional traffic. Nobody ever types in the same phrase every time they are searching for something, and by offering a range of keyword options you will naturally rank higher against smaller result sets.
Tone: There is a great tendancy among unseasoned copywriters for the web to adopt a friendly and intimate tone with the visitor. At best this looks twee and affected, and at worst patronising. 'Welcome to our website' tells both the reader and the search engines nothing other than that you are having difficulty getting started on what you have to say.
Get straight into the meat and two veg of the point you are trying to make – don’t shilly shally as attention spans on the Web aren’t that long, although I suspect they are actually a little longer than the scare figures that are often bandied about.
Check Spelling: Make sure you check your spelling. It should go without saying that spelling errors damage your credibility.
Localisation/Localization: if your target audience is in the UK, then make sure you use UK English spelling, and if in the US, then US English Spelling. If you have an international audience then either use a combination in order to capture both demographics, or opt for 'z' spellings (e.g. search engine optimization) rather than 's' spellings (e.g. search engine optimisation) to capture the highest overall volume of searches between the two catchments.
Place names: when people are searching online, they often use place names to help narrow down their search. If you don’t use place names, and use them strategically, then you are sacrificing the potential for a lot of visitors who are searching for the product or service you offer in your area. You can widen your net considerably by being comprehensive with place names: e.g. use districts, boroughs, counties and postcodes as well as towns and cities where possible.
Making your website more convenient for visitors to read and explore, and especially for visitors with special needs, can provide a useful complement to your SEO strategy.
Being user-friendly and search engine friendly often go hand in hand.
If your web pages are content rich and you are honest in the way you describe that content in the metatags then you are off to a good start. If you concentrate on context and relevance when you provide information for the search engines then the chances are that you have a usable and visitor friendly site.
Learning to write for search engines is a skill very much transferable to writing for website accessibility. If you can write clear, concise, content rich copy with search engines in mind, it is probably not far away from what counts as clear and transparent content that can be accessed, read, and understood clearly by a fairly wide demographic, including people with congitive problems, and visual or mobility impairment. Of course there is much more to website accessibility than simply writing clear text, but it’s a start at least.
Continued...
Always make sure that altenative text for hyperlinks and images is clear, accurate and descriptive. While being a useful tool for bolstering up your SEO a little, this is also a fundamental feature of an accessible website – context is what both search engines and good website accessibility require.
Similarly, hyperlink text such as, 'click here' or 'read more' means absolutely nothing to search engines and very little to screen readers (accessibility software) or readers (people). Provide context. Using link text, can also contribute to your compliancy with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), and describing links contextually is one of the items set out in the recommendations of the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative).
I should also make the point that just as what is good for SEO is also good for website accessibility, what is bad for SEO is also often bad for web site accessibility. Visitors with mobility problems, for instance, will have serious difficulties navigating a Flash site, for much the same reasons that search engines struggle with them.
We are looking at web development separately here, as it is in many ways a different discipline from web design, requiring different skill sets and technologies. The major technologies which web applications and ecommerce sites use that static, vanilla websites don’t are PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) and ASP (Active Server Pages) and sometimes PERL (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language).
Numerous PHP, ASP and PERL coding practices exist that can cripple your SEO strategy before you even begin to implement it.
Examples to follow...
The URLs show examples of using one script to generate multiple pages:
Notice that in these examples there is physically only one web page (index.php/index.asp) which, through the use of scripts, is behaving as if it were several web pages. Since the search engines only see the one physical page, it is more or less impossible to optimise each of these virtual pages individually. This is a costly mistake to make on any ecommerce project, since ideally you want to be able to optimise each of your product pages individually, or at least all of your product categories. How else are you going to sell them to people looking for them?
What search engines need to be given is a directory or file path with files which they can read sat at the end of them. So, the URLs
http://www.mywebsite.com/somepages/
and
http://www.mywebsite.com/somepages/apage.php
are both acceptable.
Get everyone together at the planning stage so that your SEO specialist can advise on what should be built into the site to make his job viable. Otherwise, you may find yourself with an eCommerce site re-engineering job on your hands, where you thought you only had to procure your SEO specialist who would then wave his magic wand over the search engines.
Find out how much you can change the backend of any proposed content management system (CMS). If there is a content management system that looks really straightforward to use, then don’t be ‘wowed’ by it until you have seen exactly what is editable. Some major subscription services really cut down on the level to which you can edit your site, and a lot of off-the-shelf packages are just as bad.
You must be able to edit your meta data and the title tag, and to manipulate headings and important content. If the system already inserts major headings that you can not change such as 'product range', 'our products' or other contextually irrelevant garbage then the system as a whole is probably useless to you and you should walk away without paying any money.
Duplication is also a problem with some of these content management systems. For instance, on some, if you change the name of the product, this also changes the wording of the title tag. This is no good as I need my product name to describe/name my product exactly and my title tag to give context and relevancy to search engines.
e.g. I want my product name to be '2.5in Electric Blue Widget'. However, I want my title tag to read 'Buy Electric Blue Widgets | Widgets in West Yorkshire UK | Bargain Widgets'.
And so, this sort of content management system is no good to me and has already ruined my chances of optimising this page, unless I want to call my product 'Buy Electric Blue Widgets | Widgets in West Yorkshire UK | Bargain Widgets', or abandon the idea of optimising my eCommerce site.
By now we have seen that search engine optimisation, and all the other components of web design and web development do not exist in isolation from one another, and that without, collaboration, communication and integration the risk of failure is considerably increased.
I should also add one further caveat for smaller web design projects here. It may seen logical that for small web sites, using just one person, or freelancer, might be the ideal solution to fulfill all of your requirements since they will obviously have a perspective on all aspects of the work. Unfortunately, this is often not quite true. Generally a web designer is not a graphic designer, or a copy writer or an SEO specialist. The single person approach poses the danger of crucial skill gaps affecting the quality of your end-product.
Chris Boswell, August 2007
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