Effective Search Engine Optimization for Web Designers

Published June 9th, 2010 in SEO - 42 Comments

Many clients ask their web designers to optimize their website to increase visibility with search engines and to attract more visitors. Some designers and agencies offer specific SEO (search engine optimization) services and others want nothing to do with SEO. Most clients that ask for a search engine optimized website understand very little about what is involved in SEO and what it takes to achieve top rankings for competitive keywords.

Because web design and SEO are closely related, it’s a topic that designers are frequently asked about, but there is often a lot of gray area about what is the responsibility of the designer and what is within the designer’s power. While many clients want the designer to create a website that ranks well and attracts targeted visitors, SEO is really an ongoing process that involves much more than the design and coding of the site. Things like keyword research, content development, and link building are also critical aspects of optimizing a website for search engines, and typically these are all ongoing processes.

Although SEO involves much more than just design, there is still a lot that the designer can do to set the foundation for an optimized website. If the designer creates a search engine-friendly site any future and ongoing SEO efforts will have a greater impact. In my opinion, web design and SEO are separate services, and a designer cannot create a truly optimized website without other pieces to the puzzle. The designer should create a search-friendly site and educate clients on what else will need to be done (such as content development and link building) in order to effectively optimize the site for searches.

In this post we’ll take a detailed look at the subject of web designers and SEO and many of the issues that are involved.

Are Paid Links a Necessary Search Engine Optimization Evil?

Published July 4th, 2008 in SEO - 28 Comments

This is a guest post written by David Brown.

What do nearly all high ranking websites have in common? As a search engine marketing consultant, I am confronted with the task of evaluating the inbound links of thousands of websites each month. In doing so, I have come to the realization that top ranking websites continue to pay for links despite Google’s public disapproval. Google’s minimalistic efforts to combat paid link building force ethical search engine marketing companies to buy links in order to compete. If done poorly, paid linkers run the risk of having short-lived benefits and potentially harmful consequences. The following tips will help you identify paid links that have positive and long-lasting results on search engine optimization efforts.

3 SEO Tools Worthy of Your Time

Published April 16th, 2008 in SEO - 62 Comments

In recent weeks I’ve come across three SEO tools that I’ve found to be very useful. Here is a look at each of these (free) tools.

Rank Checker

Aaron Wall of SEO Book recently released a powerful new Firefox add-on called Rank Checker. If you’re working on moving your site up in the SERPs, you’ll obviously want to know where you stand and to be actively tracking your progress.

As a Firefox add-on this tool is both free and very convenient to use. With Rank Checker you can input the URL that you want to track and a list of keywords that you are targeting (or just researching). You’ll then be able to choose which search engines to check (including all of the international versions of Google). The tool will then go out and get the data and bring it back to you in one convenient place.

What is the Responsibility of a Web Designer in Regards to SEO?

Published February 28th, 2008 in SEO - 30 Comments

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that cannot truly be accomplished by designing a website in a particular way, although a designer can cripple a site’s chances with a poor foundation. Building a search engine-friendly website should be the task of the designer, but there can be some gray areas.

First of all, what makes a website search engine-friendly? Things like optimized page titles, clean coding, proper use of header tags, alt tags, the location in the code of primary content, and anchor text are just some of the elements involved. Equally important, the designer should avoid using elements in the design that harm the site’s ability to be crawled. For a more in-depth look at the construction of search engine-friendly websites, see How to Create Search Engine-Friendly Websites.

Giving Your Website an SEO Check-Up

Published January 31st, 2008 in SEO - 60 Comments

Search Engine Optimization is a common concern/priority when building a new website. However, it sometimes receives little attention after the site has been up and running for a while. For website owners and bloggers alike, it can be worthwhile to do a routine check-up on the SEO health of your site periodically. Here are 10 things you can do to help identify potential improvements that can lead to higher rankings and more search engine traffic.

1. Find and Fix Dead Links

Finding dead links on a website can be time-consuming and annoying if you try to do it manually. Dead-Links.com is a free online tool that will crawl your website and search for dead links. Once you know where the dead links are, you can easily correct them.

10 Realities of Search Engine Marketing

Published October 24th, 2007 in SEO - 24 Comments

If you’re new to search engine marketing you may be confused by the contradicting information that you see online. If you’ve attempted to optimize and market a website you’ve probably learned from experience who is providing valid advice and who is pushy hype. Although this is by no means a complete look at the subject, [...]

Search Engine Traffic for New Blogs – Update

Published October 4th, 2007 in SEO - 30 Comments

Last month I posted an article with some pointers for new blogs that are trying to generate traffic from search engines. In that post I covered some of the methods that have helped me to quickly increase the traffic that comes from search engines, specifically Google. Since another month has passed, I wanted to give [...]

Driving Search Engine Traffic to a New Blog

Published September 9th, 2007 in SEO - 53 Comments

This week I am happy to be participating in a five-day series of posts about growing your blog. This post is the 1st and each of the next 4 days there will be posts by other bloggers on their own blogs. Each of the bloggers involved in this project has been experiencing growth and all [...]

30 Keyword Tools to Use for Your Website

Published August 2nd, 2007 in Marketing, SEO - 77 Comments

Part of having a successful website or blog is targeting the right keywords and phrases. This sounds like it would be an easy task, but with endless possible combinations of words and phrases it can be quite difficult to find keywords that will generate traffic from search engines without putting you in competition with too [...]

Google’s Supplemental Index: Get Out and Stay Out

Published July 25th, 2007 in Blogging, Design, SEO - 8 Comments

Google is by far the most frequently used search engine, so naturally ranking well in Google is important. However, ranking well and maximizing your traffic requires getting and keeping your pages out of the supplemental index. What is Google’s Supplemental Index? Google’s goal as a search engine is to provide the user (searcher) with the [...]