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Planning An SEO Friendly Website From The Beginning – Part 2

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

How To SEO A Website Part 2

In part one we discussed why it’s important to include SEO from the beginning of a web site design project. In part two we will highlight some early web design elements that can help your SEO campaign from the very beginning be “truly optimized”.

By now, most companies have approach a SEO firm for search engine help with a some type of website already built. For some companies the current site investment has been too large to go back and start at step 1. What they really mean when they ask for SEO is what can they optimize with what they got.

For other companies, throwing away the old site and starting with a blank slate would be the most cost effective form of SEO. A good SEO company will realize what kind of client they are dealing with, and after a site review be able to give you some options.

Realize that the site you came to the table with has already established an online presence with the search engines. The web designer has already made some SEO choices for you. If this is your, the SEO company you hire to optimize within the framework you provided, may be hamstrung to some degree unless you are willing to make serious changes.

SEO Friendly Website Hosting

With any amount of SEO research it won’t take too long before you hear of 301 redirects, canonicalizing your URL, and developing a custom 404 page. These are great SEO tips, and something you should do, but depending on your hosting it’s not always easy to do.

For example, if you are trying to save money by purchasing shared hosting on a windows server from a common hosting provider, good luck getting them to help you out. Sweet Spot is a big fan of Linux hosted sites because the open source platform provides for a simple fix with FTP access. Most sites today are hosted on either a Windows or Linux based server; however, other servers do exist such as ColdFusion. Knowing your server configuration is important in understanding your limitations and processes with this type of search engine optimization.

SEO Friendly Content Management Systems (CMS)

In 2010 the use of online CMS systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal has exploded very fast. The advantages to having and admin interface that is easy to understand is often important to clients who don’t know HTML but want to update their site. This also is great for developers because they can get accustom to one type of CMS and crank out websites very fast with some advanced functionality.

Content management systems are also very good for growth and content syndication, which are two SEO needs. The scalability and auto-archiving features these systems bring a tremendous ammount of SEO advantages as well.

From an SEO perspective, these content management systems are all not created equally! Some have a strict set of rules that prohibit the editing of raw HTML. Some were built without SEO in mind which makes optimizing certain page elements difficult if not impossible.

There are several good debates in online forums today about which CMS is best. The honest truth is they all have pros and cons for SEO and non-SEO web features. It really depends on what your goals are. For example, here is a good article by SEOMOZ comparing Wordpress vs. Joomla.

No matter what your web development needs are, an experienced SEO should be able to help you pick the best CMS and web developer to fit your needs.

SEO Friendly Site Navigation

- Can the search engines see my links?
- Why do I have 50 links in the footer that no one ever clicks on?
- Why are my URLs 150 characters long?
- Why is my site a hodgepodge of pages and hard to navigate?

There are hundreds of navigation concerns, too many to cover here. Please don’t leave the sitemap and site architecture up to a designer that cares more about the color than functionality. You’ve got questions; we’ve got answers, just please call a SEO before it’s too late!

Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design | Comments Off

Planning An SEO Friendly Website From The Beginning – Part 1

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

This 2 part series aims to educate individuals and companies that are about to venture into a new site, or redesign their existing website. The web is filled with lots of bad SEO advice, and as a responsible internet marketing company, we hate to see another company fall victim to bad SEO advice.

If you think you are “buying SEO” from a web designer for an extra ~$500 dollars, or trying to save money by managing your web design and SEO efforts separately PLEASE KEEP READING!!

If You Build It, They Won’t Come

A big misconception on the web, even in 2010, is “if you build it, they will come“. Unfortunately, the last time this strategy really worked was when Kevin Costner operated a small farm in Iowa.

Competing for search engine rankings today is harder than it was just 5 or 10 years ago. Back then, your competition didn’t employ an SEO to improve their ranking above yours, or perhaps they didn’t have a site at all.

Today the web is growing rapidly while the amount of search volume for your keywords is remaining relatively the same. This means in order to out rank your competition your website architecture is very important. Gone are the days of simply building a site and having it rank well. Now you must understand how to properly build and market your site in order for search engines to rank you well.

Web Designers Don’t Know SEO Like A True Expert:

Often times web design firms will say “SEO, sure we do that”. When all this really means is for an extra ~$500 bucks they will do a hack job on your sites title and meta tags. SEO consists of much more than title tags and meta tags, and you really are getting what you pay for when you go this route.

Sweet Spot has great relationships with several web design firms across the nation. Our intent is not to put down web design firms when we say they don’t understand SEO. We need them to build us great looking web sites, but that is typically where their expertise ends. Sweet Spot strongly recommends hiring a true online marketing professional to take a look at your SEO goals before you even get locked into a particular web design.

SEO is a term that is loosely thrown around these days without any real standards. With several articles released every day on the topic of SEO, you can image it’s difficult to filter out what is true and what is not. Because of this cloud of SEO confusion out there, many agencies and web designers who venture into SEO trying to find out what this “SEO” thing is, inevitably end up lost, confused, and overwhelmed. Inevitably this leads them to make uniformed decisions about how to properly SEO your site.

Hire A True SEO Professional:

True SEO professionals are your bridge between web design and accomplishing your online marketing goals. We have the experience, data, and knowledge about online marketing that enables us to easily wade thru what is real and what is not. This gives companies like Sweet Spot Marketing an edge over any professional web designer. We go to SEO conferences and have data to back up our methods. Quite simply, there are just not enough hours in the day for a person who builds websites all day to have the same expertise as someone who is dedicated to educating themselves daily on the latest online marketing trends and search engine news.

SEO Friendly Web Design Part 2

Tags: seo, webdesign, website design
Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design | Comments Off

20 Tips of Building Out A Site

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

This comes compliments of an article written on Search Engine Watch yesterday. I find this list humerous but also spot on when considering the building of your website. For other ideas and tips, visit our web site design page.

Don’t make your shopping pages secure. If I want to back up with the back arrow, let me see the page, not an error telling me the content has expired. Secure pages are for buying, not shopping.

Don’t make me fill out 30 fields in a form to buy a $10 t-shirt. You need the basic info required to process my credit card, not four phone numbers and a username and password.
Speaking of passwords, don’t require me to sign up for your site. I can’t remember the passwords I already have. If I just want to buy, let me buy — don’t make me join.
Don’t make me enter my credit card number to see the full price with tax and shipping. I want to know the total cost before I decide to buy.
If I’m shopping and accidentally leave your site, let me go back and see what was in my shopping cart or bag without signing in. You can do this with cookies.
People shop at work — don’t put music on your site.
If it’s on sale, tell me the price. Don’t tell me to put the item in my shopping cart to see the price.
Navigation that drops down and flies out is a pain. If I have to try three times to get the cursor on the navigation item I want, I’m going to look elsewhere.
The more products you sell, the clearer your navigation and sell message needs to be. Don’t jumble everything together
If I sort my query into cost order, don’t make me resort by cost order after the next search.
If I have to download an ActiveX control or a Flash update to see your site or products, chances are I’ll leave.
If I have to give you my e-mail address, don’t abuse it. An e-mail once in a while is fine; an e-mail every day is annoying. Also, don’t sell it — it’s mine.
Menus and price lists that are PDFs don’t always load nicely. If it’s worth being on your site, it’s worth being a regular Web page.
If I click a link and view that page, make that link change color so I know where I’ve been.
Script or cutesy fonts are hard to read. Don’t make me suffer to learn what you have to offer.
White text on a dark background is hard to read. Don’t do it.
Blinking banners, words, lights, buttons, etc. are best left in the ’90s.
I use Firefox, but most don’t — make sure your site resolves in multiple browsers.
If I click to enlarge a photo, make it a bigger photo — not the same image in a popup window.
I’m buying something, so show me what it is. Not an illustration or a product in a different color.