Before I get started, I want to point out that much of my thoughts in this post are based on a recent post by Derek Powazek on the evils of SEO. (Major props to him for fitting in the term “Faustian”!) He makes some excellent points in his post and I highly recommend you go read it when you get a chance.
The point of this post is to discuss some of the things that I tell my clients in the course of designing their website. Inevitably, as any project moves towards a go-live, the client wants to talk about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This is natural, as any one who has spent their hard-earned money on a website wants to get it in front of as many people as possible. My response to them is always the same. If you are concerned about SEO, you should be concerned about your content. Your job, as the client, is to explain your website through content that is relevant to what you’d like your site to be searched under. It’s my job, as your designer, to ensure that that content is structured in such a way that the search engines can find and index it correctly. So below are a few things that I tell my clients to think about when they are concerned with SEO.
Choose Your Keywords
The first step of any optimization is to decide on a small set of keywords that they would like to target. Most clients I’ve worked with are in the Austin area so they often find that they want to target keywords like “Austin Landscaping” or “Austin Family Doctor”. The general idea is that, the more specific the keywords, the better as it will be very difficult for any new site to gain traction on Search Engines for broad keywords like “Family Doctor” or “Landscaping”. You really have no shot at these unless you are able to get 100s of other sites to link to you, thus upping your PageRank.
Make Your Content Keyword Relevant
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, make sure that your content is relevant to it. If you create a site about landscaping and are targeting landscaping related keywords, but you’re page is just images and never mentions landscaping…you’re completely missing the point.
As an example, I recently authored a post about image slideshows in jQuery. I knew before going into it that I wanted to target very specific keywords such as “simple jquery image slideshow”, so I made sure that the title of my post included those keywords and wrote my content in a way that it was relevant to those keywords. I now receive 20-30 visits per day on that post for those exact keywords. I know I’ll never be on the front-page for “jQuery” or “slideshow”, but I’m okay with that because the post I wrote is really not targeted for those keywords.
Create Fresh Content and Keep Your Site Updated
This is the one recommendation I make to clients that is very rarely accepted. You need to take the time to keep your site updated and create new content about your topic so that your site will stay relevant. No one wants to go to a site that hasn’t been updated since 2003. Stale content gives the impression that your company is either lazy, doesn’t put importance on its web interface, or is out of business. So start a blog and talk about your industry or subject-matter expertise and keep the posts flowing.
Get Others To Link To You
This is the strategy where most SEO firms act unethically. They take your money and pay for links to your site that come through bots, pay for click, or blog spam. You don’t need this. What you need to do is seek out other sites in your industry and discuss either advertising on their site or link exchanges. Blogging also helps out here as others in your community will pick up on your posts and link to your site. Google’s algorithm is based on links, so the more links you get here (and more importantly, the quality of your links) the better off you will be.
The important thing to remember is not to try to trick anyone. People don’t like to be tricked and won’t stay at your site long if it advertises itself for something that it’s not. Don’t paste 100 keywords in your meta tags. Don’t blog spam. And most importantly, don’t write content for search engines, write it for your users.