Design Before SEO, Why you should not do it
I got a call this morning from a nice chap who informed me that he was building a shiny new site for a customer that had cost £XXX thousands, and he has now been commissioned to find someone to do the search engine optimisation…
I had a look at this shiny new site to give him an estimate on how much it would be to pick his work apart and do it properly for the search engines only to find out that it was all controlled by a custom content management system and would therefore be a total nightmare to alter to make it search engine spider (and for that matter ‘all browser’ ) friendly, as the site was built to use all manner of Internerd Exploder addons (insert version number here) which don’t work in Firefox or any other browser.
I had to ask… why had he not got an SEO company involved at the outset so that the coding of the new content managed site could have been planned around browser compatibility and search engine friendliness? The answer I got was the customer had wanted it that way… the Search Engine Optimisation aspect of the whole project had been tagged on as a sort of afterthought!
Well I can’t say I am that surprised really, as the whole SEO industry has been pushing it’s prospective wares for years on the strength that “We can rank your website for you just by throwing a few links at it.” so naturally ‘Joe Public’ thinks this is the way it should be done!
I’d like to put forward an argument now, incase any of our readers didn’t know anyway, why building a website and then attempting to rank it without any prior Search Engine Optimisation knowledge going into the original build is a stupendously bad idea…
- It is certainly going to take you just as long to re-write the website to conform to search engine friendly standards
- Picking through someone elses code is just about as frustrating as trying to bite your own toenails and equally unpleasant
- Search Engine Optimisation should be the starting point, not the end point… if you want people to see the end results then surely this is true!
- It’s of absolutely no use having a website that cannot be found or does not display in (if not all then at least) the majority of browsers - part of a good SEO’s remit is HTML and CSS validation so it pays to have your SEO coonsultant about when you are designing your sites!
- If you don’t get some SEO knowledge from the outset then think of all the cool stuff you won’t be learning!
I hope this is a convincing argument, but if it isn’t then I invite comments on how you would start to promote a website that has been written very badly, without spending loads on paid links and placements!
February 18th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I’m still not sure that websites should be “designed” for SEO, I think the copy has to be professionally written to sell to the consumer, that’s the end game after all. I know the odd keyword pushed in helps get better rankings. SEO guys should leave the headline (H1 Tag) to advertising professionals and use the body content to add fluff for the engines, or owrk harder off-site. On the same merit never leave your marketing to a designer.