SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a bit of a touchy subject in the web design community. We’ve all seen it happen.. You design a beautiful and perfect website for your client only to have them complain a month later that they are not receiving any traffic. You explain to them that you are a web designer and that web traffic falls under the realm of SEO. Your client asks you what can be done and you typically send them information for them to read or refer them to a company who specializes in SEO. There is however, another way. Many of the site updates an SEO company will require could have just as easily been done at initial design stages. In this post, I will go over some of the basic SEO terms and strategies that can be implemented while the site is being designed.

Pre-launch SEO

99% of the SEO battle is won before a single pixel is placed on the page.

At this stage, the designer can ask questions of the client that may result in answers that will inform the content and structure of the website. The questions should all revolve around making the website easier for the target audience to find through search engines. The following questions may be of help in achieving this goal.

• Demographics
  1. How old is your target market?
  2. Are they mostly male, female, or equal?
  3. What is the education level of your target market (if marketing to adults)?
• Needs
  1. What critical needs does your website provide to your company?
  2. What needs are filled for your visitors?
• Competition
  1. What other companies are using a website to satisfy the needs you outlined above?
  2. What keywords are they using to attract visitors to their site?
  3. What do people have to say about their experience at their site?
• User Experience
  1. What are the top 3 things you want your visitors to do once they find your website?
  2. What are three words you would like visitors to use when describing your website upon leaving it?
  3. What words are visitors using to describe your website?

Answers to these questions can go a long way in helping to determine not only the content and keywords that will be used but also the writing style, and the structure of the site. In the next section I will talk more about the importance of structuring the website in a logical way that will appeal to both search engines and your target audience.

Site Structure

Tell Google how to find the most important parts of your website.

When indexing your website the search engines look at everything. That’s right, every single element on the page is read and processed. The key is to tell the search engines what to pay more attention to. In particular focus on the keywords you use in the following elements when creating your website. *Note – These are not listed in any particular order of importance.

• Non-Content
  1. Title – This is the text that appears in the top menu bar of the browser. The text here is also what shows up in the search engine results. Keywords are important here.
  2. URL – Your URL optimally will include some type of keyword.
  3. Meta Description – This should be less than a paragraph and should be written in a natural spoken style that a user can easlily understand. This appears after the link in the search results. If this is missing, the search engine will just take the first few lines of actual content from your page.
  4. Meta Keywords – Many have written that Google no longer considers these when ranking a page in their search results but it has also been written that other search engines do use it, so for this reason I have included it here. This should be limited to 6-7 keywords and all the words here should occur somewhere else on the page.
• Content
  1. Heading (h1-h6) tags – indicates a section of a web page
  2. Anchor href attribute – makes up the first part of a hyperlink
  3. Anchor Text tag – makes up the second part of a hyperlink
  4. Text wrapped in tags
  5. Text wrapped in tags
  6. Content Text
  7. Image Alt attribute – used to explain what an image is to search engines
• Internal Links
  1. The more often a link appears from one page on your website to another page on your website the more importance the search engines place on the text in that URL.
  2. If the link contains an image rather than text, the search engines will use the text in the image alt attribute to determine what text to use.
• Outbound Links
  1. Outbound links are helpful because they establish a relationship between the site that the link appears and the site where the link points to.
  2. These are most helpful if the URL text and destination from your site are similar in content to the outbound site.
• Inbound Links
  1. Inbound links are helpful because, just like outbound links they establish a relationship between websites.
  2. These are most helpful to you if the URL text and inbound website’s content is similar to the content you have on your website.
  3. You get the most effect if the website referring you has a higher rank than yours.
  4. Rank is like authority, which means that a website has established itself to the search engines as a reliable source of information for the keywords a user typed into the search bar.

A primary focus should be to place your keywords throughout your site in a natural way. Don’t fall victim to “keyword stuffing” because that can actually cause your site to be lowered in the search results. This was a tactic that web marketers used years ago but the search engines have grown wise to this. So just write your content in a natural and logical way that can benefit your readers and also make your site easier to index for the search engines.

But I’m a web designer, not an SEO professional

Yes, the hard-core SEO stuff should be left to the professionals. I am by no means suggesting that following the guidelines in this post will put any SEO professional out of business. But who knows, you may be able to save your client a few bucks by just implementing a few simple SEO techniques that can be built into the design of the website.

Please take the opportunity to fill in what I have missed in the comments.