Web Design News

We actually turned work away today … not because we’re too busy to handle any more (which we just about are) but because it was too late to do what the new client wanted us to do.

This website owner had employed someone else … a friend I think she said … to build an online store for them and now that the store was complete they wanted us to do some SEO work for them. One quick look at the site was enough to tell us that there was going to be very little in the way of search engine optimisation that we could do for the site.

The site was built using a shopping cart script that we’re quite familiar with and it is possible to make sites built with this script do really well in the search engines but ….

To make that happen the search engine optimisation people have to be there from the start. They need to have some say in the overall design of the site and not be left out till the very end because by then it’s just way too late. With this particular script there are too many important variables that become non-variable once the site is ready to go live and there’s very little search engine optimisation anyone can do from that point on.

And that’s why we turned this work away. It would have been a waste of our time and the clients money to have pretended otherwise. I did point out to the client though that she would find plenty of people who would claim that they can do things to improve the search engine rankings for the site but they were all snake oil salesmen.

So remember, when you’re having a new site built be sure to include the search engine optimisation people right from the start because once the design work is finished it’s way too late to start thinking about achieving a good position in any of the major search engines.

Now there’s an interesting question to ask your web designer. Obviously Google is the leading search engine on the planet but what come in at number two?

If you’re designer tells you that it’s Yahoo! or MSN/Live then he’s either out of touch or he doesn’t care and either way you really don’t want him working on your site. In the last couple of weeks Yahoo! has slipped to the number three spot and something quite different to your normal search engine has taken its place.

If there is one unchangeable truth in the web design and search engine optimisation industry it’s that nothing stays the same and everything is changing.

While many web designers here in Hervey Bay still seem to think that search engine optimisation is all about submitting their clients’ sites to Google the world has moved on.

It’s also a lot more than just getting a few links pointing back to a website. Google’s personalised search is about to engulf us and that is going to change the search engine landscape in ways that a lot of people haven’t even thought about yet. 

These days search engine optimisation is a lot more than just submitting a site to Google, or getting a few links, as Lee Odden points out here.

There’s a short but important discussion going on over at Webmaster World right now about the need to use this meta tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

What people like Edward Lewis and Brett Tabke certainly make sense.

Google has announced that it can use speech recognition technology to transcribe videos from YouTube … and I guess other places … into text which it can then index.

Think about it for a while, could we soon see videos ranking at the top of Google search engine results pages because of what is said in the video?

There is no doubt that video has become an important part of marketing on websites … just look at the quotes on the top of this video production business’ website … but now it might have just become even more important.

If you’re a web designer who is also seriously into search engine optimisation (and not just paying lip service to SEO) then you’ll know of the problems involved in getting Google to crawl a website that uses a lot of Flash.

Only last week I was asked to review a local photographer’s website that is uses a lot of Flash throughout the site. I found that in four years Google has never been able to get beyond the index page because the designer had not provided any work-around for the search engine spiders to to crawl the site and so the search engine rankings for the site were basically non-existant.

But now there’s some good news for Flash based sites. Adobe - the company that produced the Flash technology - has now provided a way for Google to crawl Flash sites. It’s not the complete solution but it is a step in the right direction and it’s still no excuse for failing to provide a text link to a sitemap that Google can follow.

You can read about Google crawling and indexing flash content here and here

If you’re a web designer and you’re serious about what you do and you really do want to give your clients the very best outcomes that you can possibly provide then what are you doing about search?

The search landscape is changing every single day so are you really keeping up with the changes or are you still producing sites that didn’t work last year and aren’t about to work any time in the future?

Here’s a little quote that should be imprinted on the brain of every person who thinks that they can design a content management system.

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created.

It comes from this post on Graywolf’s SEO Blog and the whole post is definitely worth reading.

Late Thursday afternoon Toni and I were getting ready to shut up shop for the Easter weekend. We were sitting here planning the stuff that we had to pack in the car to take on the trip to visit our grandkids in the next state when the phone rang.

It was one half of a husband and wife team who are employing us to do a little development and search engine optimisation on their website and the work was to start this week so I presumed the call was about the work we were to do … but it wasn’t.

Instead the call was about a minor change I had suggested that they make to their website before we even touched it. The change really was very minor … just the addition of three words but it had produced what the client considered was an amazing result. This couple had been trying to get their website up to the first page of Google for a term that was very important to them for months and they had not succeeded.

So they had come to us and that minor addition of just three words had lifted them right up to position five on the first page. The client was ecstatic and that’s what we aim for … clients who can see real value in the work that we do for them. It was definitely a great start to the Easter weekend for us.

It really doesn’t matter where you’re business is situated; if your website needs some search engine optimisation to get it onto page one of Google then call or email us to see if we can achieve the results you want. We can’t guarantee that just three words is all it’s going to take to get your website onto the first page of Google but we will give you an honest appraisal of what will need to be done.

Apart from web design, web hosting and copywriting we also do quite a bit of search engine optimisation work for our own clients both here in Hervey Bay and around the world. We also do quite a bit of SEO on a sub-contract basis for other web support businesses and it seems that our work is just as effective for them as it is for our own clients.

A little over two weeks ago we did some work for one of those web support businesses where we had to target 21 different keyword phrases. Yesterday they wrote to us about the work we had done for them.

Here are some rankings for xxxx. We already have some nice results. I am quite pleased with these fast results and rankings. It usually takes longer than this to see these kind of results.

It seems that in a highly competitive area we had achieved:

•  12 listings on the first page of the search engine results pages for those terms
•  7 listings on the second page
•  1 listing on the third page
•  1 listing on the fourth page

Of course we would like to see all of them on page one of the search engine results pages but 12 out of the 21 isn’t bad for some pages of a site that have only been live for two weeks.

If you need some quality search engine optimisation work done on your site then you know where to come