SEO Guide for Designers
According to a poll I conducted, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory as a designer; and what really surprised me is about 24% don’t even know what SEO is! If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article. This is an SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. I’ll explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers. Then I’ll provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.
Why Should You Learn About SEO?
SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility.
If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in "www.yourwebsite.com" and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on average, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 - 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Imagine, without search engine referrals, I would be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That means, I’m risking losing potential clients too.
SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.
The Basics: How Search Engines Work?
First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.
When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.
What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.
Your Job As a Search Engine Optimizer
Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorihm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.
On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your site, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.
Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.
This is a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly though, if you do your job right… and design a beautiful site… and/or produce useful content… you’ll get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.
Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers
1. Splash Page
I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage. The worst case — the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.
This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.
Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.
2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus
Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.
3. Image and Flash Content
Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.
4. Overuse of Ajax
A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.
Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.
5. Versioning of Theme Design
For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.
6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text
You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”
Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.
7. Common Title Tag Mistakes
Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique
Why Should You Learn About SEO?
SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility.
If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in "www.yourwebsite.com" and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on average, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 - 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Imagine, without search engine referrals, I would be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That means, I’m risking losing potential clients too.
SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.
The Basics: How Search Engines Work?
First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.
When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.
What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.
Your Job As a Search Engine Optimizer
Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorihm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.
On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your site, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.
Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.
This is a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly though, if you do your job right… and design a beautiful site… and/or produce useful content… you’ll get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.
Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers
1. Splash Page
I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage. The worst case — the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.
This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.
Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.
2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus
Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.
3. Image and Flash Content
Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.
4. Overuse of Ajax
A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.
Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.
5. Versioning of Theme Design
For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.
6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text
You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”
Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.
7. Common Title Tag Mistakes
Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique
Labels: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home