Combining Web Design and SEO Services

12/27/2006

A website that looks great and is easy to navigate is a must. When designing the look and feel of a site it’s important to approach the design focused squarely on making your site a pleasure for visitors to navigate - that’s goal #1 in web design. Once the design has been approved and your web designer goes off to turn the prototype into actual HTML code, there is a second aspect of web design that should not be forgotten – search engine optimization services (SEO) is the art of making a site easy for the search engines to navigate.

The Importance of SEO in Web Design

According to a June 2006 survey by Netcraft, there are now over 80 million websites on the Internet. In fact, the number of sites is growing at a faster rate all the time, due in large part to increasing numbers of services that provide ‘cookie-cutter’ or ‘template’ sites for free or very cheap.

Graph courtesy NetCraft

   As you embark on creating or upgrading your website, how is your site going to attract visitors over all those other sites? There are still only 10 results on the first page of Google for your best search term, how are you going to differentiate your site in the eyes of the search engines in order to gain that traffic? A proper SEO design is a critical first step.

   Most people realize that a custom site can have a huge advantage over template sites such as a Yahoo! store or something built with an online site builder. However, many web designers still create custom sites that are visually appealing to a user, but not very friendly to the search engines. If you choose the wrong web designer, a custom site could actually be LESS search engine friendly than a free site might be. So how can this be? Why are there still designers out there creating websites without even a first thought about how the search engines will react to it?

1) They Are Not Aware of SEO
   Many web designers are simply not aware or not concerned with optimizing a site for search engines. These are usually old-school designers that are all about the user experience. Of course the user experience is important, but there’s nothing that says you can’t have a great user experience AND get great search traffic from the same design.

2) Popular Web Design Tools Ignore SEO
   If your web designer uses a popular web design tool such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage to create sites, be aware that those tools pretty much ignore SEO in the HTML code they generate. These days the best designs from both a user and search engine perspective are achieved through hand coding HTML and CSS. Yes, it requires a designer knowledgeable in those technologies and may sometimes cost a little more, but it is always worth it. The bottom line is you shouldn’t skimp on your design now only to pay for it in poor search rankings or increased SEO costs later.

3) It’s Not a Web Designer’s Job
   Some web designers feel that SEO optimizing the site they create is outside of their job description. They may say that it’s the job of an SEO firm to optimize the pages, and in some ways they are right. However, completely ignoring search engine readability from the beginning can make it very expensive, if not impossible to go back later and create the nice lightweight pages that search engines love. Make sure your site is optimized from the start, so you don’t have to pay someone else to go back and do it again the right way.

How to Determine If Your Design Is Search Engine Friendly

   So I can hear you thinking: “That’s good to know, but how do I determine if the design I just paid for is well optimized for the search engines?” To illustrate this, let’s take a look at an example of a site that is poorly optimized for search:

http://www.whoopdesign.com

This company seems to have some talented web designers. Their site definitely shows that with some unique navigational elements. I love how the navigation is a can of ‘whoop’. Unfortunately, from a search engine perspective this site is a mess.

   As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible for a site to look great and be a joy for visitors to navigate while at the same time appearing to be a virtual blank page to the search engines. This is because search engines are nothing more than computer programs, so what they ‘see’ is the underlying HTML code. To view the source HTML code of a web page, right click on the page and select ‘View Page Source’.

Amazingly, in the case of Whoop Design’s site, there is zero text on the page. It is ALL HTML tags with a little Flash embedded. While the user is provided with a neat little site that shows off the company’s web design skills, this entire page is completely meaningless to a search engine – it may as well be blank. I imagine this company would like to rank well in the search engines for web design-related terms, but there is absolutely nothing on this page that tells a search engine that this site is about a web design company. Here are a few key features of well optimized HTML source:

More Content, Less HTML
   Most of the style elements of a site should be pushed off into external CSS files, leaving very little for the search engines to see other than the text on the page, which should be keyword-rich quality content directly related to the search terms you want to rank well for.

Use of Header Tags
   Header tags are HTML tags that look like <H1>this</H1>. It’s also useful to employ H2 and H3 tags as well. The search engines pay attention to what’s in these tags and give extra weight to keywords in these tags.

Search Engine Friendly Links
   Search engines follow links from one page to another all throughout your website in order to find all the pages to include in their index. They look for links designated by an <A> tag, for example:

<a href="http://www.bitwiselogic.com/">Bitwise Logic</a>

On the example site’s homepage, there are no links of this type, so how are the search engines supposed to even find the other pages, much less rank them highly for relevant keywords?

Conclusion

In this article we’ve discussed how a website can look much different to a human visitor than a search engine. We also discussed why it’s important to hire a web designer that knows and cares about how search engines view your site. Hiring a designer that is knowledgeable about search engine optimization and carefully hand codes your site is a big advantage and shouldn't cost much more than other designers. Search engine optimization services are indeed separate from web design, but all of the websites we create at Bitwise Logic are given the extra touches to ensure that they are, at their core, search engine friendly, helping our clients achieve better search rankings from day one.

Whether you are starting a new project or looking to improve search rankings for an existing site, feel free to request a quote and we'll provide you with a no obligation estimate to get the project done right.