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.

“The most important thing is to have a clear idea of what you want the end product to be. The vision needs to be clear and you need to be able to articulate that to designers. The biggest mistakes I have ever made in development was when I started and tried to figure it out along the way. Communication is also critical. A good design team has to be able to communicate the pros, cons and alternatives. My group never says something can not be done. They may scratch their heads and give me a cost but they never say it can not be done. They are also extremely good at articulating alternatives. I am very careful not to micro manage them …”

In fact it was so important to get this site online that the client get something up there even if it was rather rough and ready … at least it was something that was online and it could be cleaned up later.

So the “rough” version went fully live yesterday and the client is already using it to generate leads for his business. In his words:

“I love it … it loads fast and it’s so easy for visitors to find their way around and it displays my stock so well.”

The finished site for our client will be no different either. Clients don’t want commercial sites that are bogged down by huge graphics and lots of unnecessary flash. They want sites that will generate leads and make sales and that’s what we give our clients every time.

It seems that one of his suppliers liked the site architecture too and we may be looking at redesigning that business’ site too. 

It’s experience that counts and people who have been burnt by poor designs are beginning to wake up to that fact!

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

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.

Perhaps the worst example I’ve seen of it was a small business that had a great write-up in a local magazine … the article even included a reference to a website but when you went to the website all you got was a full  page ad for the web designer.

It doesn’t need to be that way … those interim index pages can be made to work for the client with very little effort from the design team. Those temporary pages don’t have to be fancy … they just have to advertise the client and not the designer.

 We’ve thrown up temporary index pages for two of our clients recently and both of them … a husband and wife team who gourment ready-made meals in Hervey Bay … and Wide Bay Imports have found that their sites are already generating leads and sales for them.

So perhaps it’s time to remember who you’re working for when a client comes to you to develop a new site and get their online business off to a good start with a temporary index page that actually advertises their business and not yours.

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

Another unhappy client from a web design business that describes itself as “an industry leader” and claims to have won awards has just signed on with us.

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?