Feature Article

Designing For Search Engines

by: Bay Street SEO Company

Web programmers and Web designers need to concern themselves with search engine optimization needs. Optimizing sites for search engines is extremely important today and a designer or programmer who knows how to build a site that can be a search engine ranking leader can help great deal. It is something SEO companies look for in new subcontractors and can be a resume booster as well. Few employers are not interested in someone who can boost the bottom line.

On the other hand, if design and programming aren’t done with search engine rankings in mind, it represents a big liability for the client’s online marketing success. Too often when an SEO Company is hired to help out, we find we have to compensate for a poorly structured web site, particularly dynamic content areas.

There may be few things designers and programmers can do to help the customers bottom line so when an opportunity to help out appears, why not do it? Helping the search engine optimizer to help the client can show you’re a team player, a "can do" kind of person.

When consulting, I analyze client’s sites and discover why they’re not doing well in the search engines. Many clients have their heads spinning with doubt about why their site isn’t achieving sufficient sales or referrals. Often, SEOs will be blamed for the failure even through they had nothing to do with the design, architecture, product selection, copy, and presentation of the pages to the search engine robots. There’s only so much an SEO company can do to make a site that lacks cohesiveness into a winner. If it has a flawed structure with content that appears irrelevant to search engines, and the server presents all sorts of technical problems, at one point or another the site will fail.

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Programmers and Designers helping Company Profits

The attitude of some web programmers toward SEO is one of indifference. The programmer isn’t in marketing and isn’t going to benefit from sales increases so why put the extra effort into helping? It’s the same with designers. There is little reason to cooperate or help out. Many times, the server uses programming that generates duplicate content, uses strange redirects, and links from ill advised locations that contributes to poor rankings and wastes a lot of ranking resources. Ranking resources are like a digital currency. If they aren’t transferred to the right account in the right type of currency, then the account will sit empty.

How can designers help with powerful search engine design? There’s many ways. First of all, learning to design with CSS is very helpful. CSS-only design eliminates all redundant source code so all that is left is content. The first time my designer used CSS only pages, the rankings jumped. The key to this is that the content and links will all be in close proximity for maximum ranking benefit. With html design, you can use what are known as table tricks to allow some text content to appear higher in the source code, so search engine spiders will read it right away rather than it having to dig way down for it. Search engines rightly respect material that seems to be at the top of the page where real people can see it. That makes it more relevant.

Search Engine Friendly Design Isn’t Enough

Search engine friendly design is about allowing search engines to reach web pages and index them successfully. In today’s hypercompetitive search engine listings, that’s not enough. Now, you your design has be much better than your competitor’s designs. You’re competing with them to produce the most effective Web site. Effective means designing to allow highly valuable ranking copy and links to work together on the site.

Search engines read page themes and analyze linking patterns in a site. They do it by following body text. They tend to filter out the common navigation menus on every page. So having a menu of links in a menu bar or links down at the bottom of the page does very little for your site’s rankings. Instead, a designer needs to build flexibility into the site structure to allow the search engine optimizer to get the right text and links into the specific pages it is needed. Rigidly designed, templated sites with lots of redundant copy present SEO companies with severe challenges. These sites don’t allow us to present the site in the best way to achieve top rankings, especially if there is a desire to rank for many different keyword phrases.

Programmers that build an ad hoc architecture that uses redirects, meta refreshes, urls with unusual characters, and present the same content repeatedly via different urls create unseen penalties that SEO companies spend time figuring out. What’s needed is a production system that prevents duplication and converts dynamic urls to plain simple ones. Again, rigidly-templated sites that only use includes for database fields creates pages that Google loves to screen out. Redundancy doesn’t just mean duplicate content, it also means redundant linking, such as links from navigation menus. Having navigation menus isn’t enough. What’s needed is manually written copy and links for each page. You should at least enable manual rewriting of product descriptions and create an area before and after the product listings, for the SEO company to include relevant copy. Without that relevant copy, the search engine won’t regard the product listings as unique or valuable. It may not even be able to ascertain what product it is you have on the page.

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While we’re on the topic of e-commerce and product sales, search engines do like product pages and you have the opportunity to have your pages rank highly for a specific brand or product model number. Many ecommerce sites earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year yet have no major keyword rankings. They rank at the top for some obscure product model number that only a few people search for. Multiply that by 10,000 products and you have 30,000 highly qualified customers showing up at your site.

To encourage buy in on SEO issues and optimization, programmers and designers should be rewarded for their search engine friendly production. Since I started optimizing in 1998, I’ve always said that good designers and programmers make a site successful or they can make it fail. Many managers believe they can do neither.

Search engines are very important to online success, and even to offline companies who benefit from online visibility. With all due respect to Jakob Nielson, it’s not enough to build a pretty site that serves fast, navigates easily, and converts like crazy. You can’t put the cart before the horse. The key to online success is creating a site that will rank highly for a lot of keyword phrases in the major search engines. Take a look at top ranking sites and you’ll see many are not so smooth or pretty. They’re presenting their content the way search engines like it.

Please help the SEO Company

No, Google doesn’t suck. They’re a great organization that has created great interest in Web sites that may not even deserve it. There are few web sites I know of that say anything that hasn’t been said thousands of times, or which aren’t just selling the same products hundreds of other sites are selling. Whether the site’s importance and value are over-inflated or not, the goal of an SEO company is to make your client’s Web site appear in front of consumers against billion dollar companies. What other medium provides that kind of exposure across North America?

With good design and good programming, a Web site can be something special and unique, and is one that Google wants to present to its users. An SEO company can do a great deal for a client, but the client’s team has to help out, because these are very competitive times. If you don’t have everything just right, you don’t stand a chance.

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Bay Street Search Engine Optimization is an SEO company specializing in Website design, development, Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Copywriting, and advanced techniques to increase traffic and convert sales.

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Second Article

Web Site Maintenance Essentials

by: Stacy Hensley Web Design Essentials

We all know that the design of any site is a key factor to building traffic that keeps coming back. Another key factor to keeping people interested is web site maintenance. When a site isn't maintained regularly it becomes obvious to your visitors and they won't continue to return. If you don't take the time to update the site then they won't waste their time visiting. Below you will learn a few simple maintenance steps to keep your site updated.

First, always keep your contact information updated. If you change email addresses remember to update this on all your sites. Nothing looks worse than when someone tries to contact you and the email is returned or they get an invalid email error.

Secondly, be sure and keep any copyright notices updated. If I visit a site and see the copyright is from 2006 then I know the webmaster doesn't spend much time updating the site. Small things such as this will be noticed by many people. So to keep the site looking professional be sure to do the small updates as well as the bigger ones.

Finally, update your content regularly. Fresh information will keep people coming back to see what's new about any subject. Visitors will see that you regularly add new content and they will come back often to check it out. If it's possible add dates to your content. This let's them see how frequently you update.

Maintenance is just 1 of many key factors to running a successful web site. I find it helpful to set aside a couple of hours on a certain day each week just for updating. This way it is on my schedule of things to do and it doesn't get overlooked. Scheduling web site tasks makes it easy to keep up with what needs to be done at certain times. Running a web site is not always easy, but by putting in the time and effort required you get rewarded with great results.

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Find more Web Design tips and tricks by visiting Web Design Essentials Blog

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