It is 2010, should your web designer understand how the Search Engines work and the “on-page” elements of a good SEO strategy?
Yes they should, yet many of the designers I work with both directly and indirectly are not at all knowledgeable regarding SEO and ultimately your business goals. Your designers need to completely understand both the high level business goals and tactical goals of a website. In many cases the goal is to complete some call to action: a sale, a phone call, a registration or a download.
If potential customers can not find your site, well then, how are those calls to action going to happen?
Every website should have search engine optimization best practices employed. It should be an absolute pre-requisite of your marketing department and therefore your web design staff. There is no reason not to try to capture as much organic search traffic as possible, is there?
That being said here are a few must ask questions and suggestions for your web designer(s):
- What technology is going to be used to design the site? Certain technologies like Flash are not as search engine friendly as others and unless there is a real need to use it, it is unnecessary and should not be used.
- Websites need to be search engine friendly by having: a sitemap, strong internal linking from page to page, a robots.txt file to help the search engines navigate the site.
- Proper URL naming conventions should be used. Use descriptive terms in your URL’s so someone seeing it knows what you do or are selling
- Proper use of the “nofollow” tag to let the engines know not to crawl certain pages of your site that have limited SEO value
- You need to provide your designer with the proper meta tags and meta descriptions for each page on the site. Do not use duplicate meta tags and descriptions.
- For shopping sites:
- If you have a category page, for example shoes, then each product within that category should have a separate page to maximize the number of keywords you can optimize on.
- Split Categories into as many logical pages as possible. Have separate pages for black shoes, white shoes, and boots etc, therefore each can be optimized for those relevant searches and rank highly in the search engine results page.
- Make sure whatever shopping cart product is used can support descriptive terms and phrases for your products, that can be easily edited.
- Make sure your shopping cart can support Google Analytics
- Make sure your shopping cart allows for user defined page titles, and page headers. Some carts force you to use category names and product names as your page titles and headers. This is not good!
- Leave room in the footer section of each web page to repeat your page titles as H1 or H2 headers.
- Include Google Analytics code in each web page for proper tracking and reporting.
- Build flexibility into the design to leave room for changes and growth. Your website is a living thing, think Beta, and it must accommodate regular changes to layout, text, aesthetics and navigation.
If you are not going to use an SEO specialist to help optimize your site, then make sure that search readiness is an important part of your designer’s specification. It is much easier to incorporate a solid search strategy when building a site, then changing the site afterward to accommodate that strategy. Plan up front and have your designer fully involved in the ultimate goals of your website.
Questions: email dave@d4bmarketing.com
www.d4bmarketing.com
