Posted on: 02/12/2010
I often get asked by agencies to take a look at the design for a new site in terms of SEO, so I thought I’d come up with a basic checklist for account managers to help critique your designers latest work of art.
Whether or not the brief from the client includes SEO, and often it doesn’t, it’s still essential to ensure the basics are met if for no other reason than to keep your portfolio clear of anything which other agencies at a pitch will pick apart as a reason not to hire you.
Another good reason to use these methods is that sites built with SEO in mind usually work a lot better on mobile devices as they are much easier to navigate.
Just before I get started, I’ll be using the term H1 tag quite a bit below so in case you’re not familiar with this I’ll explain.
Very simply, it’s just the name given to the size of text on the site, however not all text, only selectable text (not the ones in an image). This is important because search engines give a lot of credibility to H1 sized text so knowing how to look for it is essential in your critique.
If your client is going to be found, lets say, for a search like ‘widget manufacturers in Hampshire’ you need to tell the search engine this as clearly as possible, and preferably a few times over.
You can do this with H1 tags and the higher up the site they are the better, if you want to really get them noticed make them links too, something like ..
We design and manufacture Widgets in Hampshire
or
We design and manufacture Widgets in Hampshire
You’ll see the main keywords are also links, almost certainly these will be to the sites internal pages, they should be.
Now if this is done we also need to drive the message home so ensure that there is accommodation for the same text at least twice more on the page, it doesn’t have to be huge text though, perhaps one in the welcome paragraph and another on the footer of the site.
Sticky content was a term I loved to impress new clients with a few years ago but most people of heard of it now so it’s not got quite the same charm, however the concept applies more than ever.
Search engines have a job to provide the best and most up to date sites to their users, if your site hasn’t changed for months/years then it’s going to get relegated because you haven’t given the robot anything new and interesting to index.
So there is an easy way to ensure this one is ticked off, make sure the clients news or blog articles show up on the homepage and if they haven’t got either of these then try and sell them one for this reason.
You may well have a twitter feed on the site and this does help to a degree but in doing so each of the links will take you straight to Twitter and not to an internal page which would work a lot better.
Drop-down menus are not altogether bad and many sites use them, done the right way they can still be indexed by search engines, however they often lead to an issue.
Most often the drop-down links will take the user straight to the product or service page for that client unless its a very large site, well this is fine and keeps the number of clicks down, however only having one small text link on the site to that page many not give the significance to that page you would like.
A better way would be to have a hub page in it’s place which lists the products and services and uses some nice H1 links to get to them. This has two additional benefits, firstly that you can market those hub pages directly in your CPC campaigns which often uplifts the drop off rates and also gives the site a path, which I discuss here.
If the client is selling, lets say, Widget one, Widget two and Widget three are there good sized text links from the home or hub pages? This isn’t always easy if the client sells a lot of products but in most cases a client will have it’s favorites which it wants to be indexed for and these ones should be the main links.
Coming back to our client with the tagline, widget manufacturers in Hampshire, they may well want to be very well indexed regionally. Now there is Google Places and other services which drive this to a large degree however you do need to make sure that the region, in this case Hampshire, is mentioned a few times in text links on the main pages.
One way to do this is in the site’s header, something like …
Contact our Hampshire office: 02380 000009
Images can’t be indexed for text in Google and although Flash can possibly be indexed it’s unwise to use this method. Ensure that any text that you want search engines to read are in text which can often be achieved by overlaying text on an image.
A breadcrumb, if you haven’t come across this term before is the set of links, usually below the sites top navigation and contains the location of the user within the site, typically something like
These are not only useful, especially for large sites, for users to find their way around the site, but also as an extra text tag for the search engines to index. Most CMS systems have the ability to have a breadcrumb but before you dictate this requirement it’s worth just checking with your tech person, or me.
Will making these changes make the site look worse? Will they mean the client won’t sign off the design? Will our designer resign when I bring these up? No, probably not.
All the major sites, and I would argue the best looking ones all use most if not all of these methods, especially those optimised for mobiles.
I provide digital consultancy to professional design and marketing agencies who wish to grow and profit from their web offering without risky expansion costs and project overruns.
© Creative Technologist. All Rights Reserved.
About / Contact / Legal & Privacy / Domains for Sale
I work exclusively with a small number of marketing and design agencies in London and the South of England on a consultancy basis.
Got a comment? Good or bad I'd love to hear it
blog comments powered by Disqus