4 Steps Web Designers Need to Deliver Minimum Viable SEO
- 23 February 2012
- Written by Craig Wilson
You owe it to the world to make your website search engine friendly. Yet why do so many designers and developers ignore search engine optimization (SEO)?
We asked a few for feedback and the typical responses were:
"SEO is too complicated and requires a lot of knowledge"
"I'm not sure where to get started"
"I'm just not an expert in this stuff"
It's this perceived complexity of SEO that causes most designers and developers to ignore the largest source of web users entirely. It's a big problem.
As a designer you only need to be minimally good at SEO right out of the gate. Your goal should be simply to let Google access and understand the pages on each site, not hit number one against all competitors immediately.
SEO is easiest when you think about it before you start coding. About 2 hours of upfront thought can save you weeks of frustration in the future and help you clients immeasurably. Think about SEO when you are sketching out the basic navigational structure of the site on a sheet of paper. There are literally hundreds of "advanced tips" that are best ignored at this stage unless you've done this before. That stuff will eventually matter, but avoid SEO "feature creep" for now.
1. Decide if you're a "long tail" or "head" site.
If you're a "long tail" site, you want to show up in Google search results when people infrequently type in seemingly obscure queries around the industry in question. If you're a head site, you're trying to show up for terms that people search for millions of times a month, the main industry searches.
The good news for "long tail" sites is there is a lot of room for you to get traffic early because you're targeting less competitive search terms. However you'll need lots of pages targeting lots of terms.
If you're a "head site" you really just need to focus on optimizing the homepage for a particular search term before building links.
2. Use bread crumb navigation
Google is like a curious visitor who keeps clicking through each link on your site to satisfy an unquenchable desire to make sense of your website. We always say that every page of your site is like a home page. From any one page that Googlebot is perusing, you want to make it dead simple for it to click through and discover almost all of your content.
The easiest way to let Google quickly access any page on your site with the fewest clicks is using a bread crumb navigation. This forces you to structure your entire website in a way that Google will like. In this form of navigation your content is organized in a browseable hierarchy like:
Home > Category > Sub-Category > Product
You should then take this bread crumb structure and mirror it to build your URL structure.
Using breadcrumbs forces you to organize your content in a logical and scalable fashion, you'll be happy you did it later when it comes to basic things like maintaining your sitemap or more complicated things like how you spread your link equity across your site.
3. Page Titles
The act of titling the page is more important than the actual page titles. It's like learning to write an essay where you have really good topic sentences. By doing so, Google can quickly understand what's going on and dive in deeper to learn more.
When you do a Google search, the Big Blue Underlined Links are almost always the site's page titles. They matter because they tell Google "this is what my site is about, please show it if you think it's relevant". Not having accurate page titles is like writing a 5,000 word essay in one paragraph, it doesn't work.
4. Use NLYZR
NLYZR was designed to ensure your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is Google friendly and correctly structured. You can test and re-test each page until it is set up perfectly. You can also compare each page against high ranking competitors for each search term so that you (or your client) can understand what is required to outperform them in search. You'll see whether competitors are properly optimised, their PageRank and how many inbound links they have.
NLYZR was designed to help small businesses, marketers and web designers get the best out of their websites. Its simple, fast and very cost-effective. Membership is FREE.
