Web Design and SEO Go Hand in Hand
I’m often asked how Search Engine Optimization works and without being an expert on the subject, what I can tell you is that SEO is about more than just adding a few keywords, as a small article on the British Computer Society website points out the optimization of your website for organic traffic starts with the design. While I was ‘across the pond’ I also came across a strange article by Nick Sommerlad on SEO spam. What I found odd about it wasn’t the article (OK that was strange too) but the comments, take a look and you’ll see what I mean … those Brit’s seem to get pretty passionate about bashing things. Search Engine Land had a feature this morning called Are You an SEO Hybrid?. The article pretty much covers my life with questions like:
- “I didn’t hire you to redesign my site. I hired you to get my site #1 on Google.”
One article that really caught my attention today was over at addicottweb.com and it focussed on how to fix some of the problems WordPress has with SEO. I’ll admit that WordPress isn’t well optimized out of the box but I’m going to have to disagree on the solution. The two plugins he recommends (All-in-One SEO plugin & SEO Title Tag plugin) are acceptable if you have no programming skills but a much better solution is to take care of the problem yourself in the code. Here’s my three simple recommendations for people who are legitimately concerned with WordPress SEO:
This allows you to do something that neither plugin will do, control your blog. Remember that major search engines don’t care who (or how) you optimized your blog poorly, so take ownership of it and do it right or you might be making the worst mistakes you can.
Jonathan Aston wrote an interesting piece on SEO and made the point that country specific domain names are a great idea. I also wanted to point out that Dave Bascom has the funniest license plate I’ve seen in weeks and that the economy may be tanking but jobs for people in the SEO field? On the rise …
Thanks for referencing my post from yesterday. I just wanted to respond to two of your points:
#2: I hadn’t thought to use the post tags as the META keywords, but that’s an interesting approach that I like. I agree, it is definitely an approach that someone more familiar in working with the code should take.
#3: I had come across your idea when I was researching what I wrote, but the one problem that I was reading people had with doing it that way is that if your excerpt is written so that flows with the context of your article, it might not necessarily contain as strong a focus or as many keywords as a well-refined description does. That’s not to say it wouldn’t work though, but I think it all depends on the person’s writing style.
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Hi Addicott, thanks for the comments. The one thing I love about what we do for a living is how many ways there are to do it! You’re right of course, the problem(s) with my method are that you have to be careful when writing the Excerpts.
Excellent Christopher. Funny, I visited the first link in this blog about Web design crucial to SEO and his permalinks could be set up better. See this url:
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.24278
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Coding theme for wordpress could be very interesting process if you have seo in mind. There are many of tricks and taking care all of them could be a difficult task.
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It’s funny, WordPress itself is perfectly tuned for quality SEO but most people don’t take the time to do a few small improvements to make the most of it. Hopefully some of my tips here can help change that.
The use of search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques when redesigning a website should not be overlooked by small-to-medium enterprises (SME), according to one expert.
Keywords should be taken into account by redevelopers when planning out a new-look website, Mr Garner advised.
Also, keeping sections of the website which have attracted traffic in the past in action has also been advised.
I have read alot of articles saying meta tags and keywords doesn’t really affect much these days?
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I don’t think anybody outside Google can really say for sure if META still matters but my option is pretty straight forward. If you use META tags properly, there’s no damage that can be done from it. If you abuse the tags, I believe you get punished.
The recommendations you have given here are very useful for me,I take them into consideration as far as I am going to redesign my website.
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How important are META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION? I have read somewhere that google now does not place much importance on this.