Why Should You Learn About SEO?
- SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility.
- If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in "www.yourwebsite.com" and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
- There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on average, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 - 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Imagine, without search engine referrals, I would be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That means, I’m risking losing potential clients too.
- SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.
The Basics: How Search Engines Work?
First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.
When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.
What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.
Your Job As a Search Engine Optimizer
Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.
On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your site, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.
Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.
This is a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly though, if you do your job right… and design a beautiful site… and/or produce useful content… you’ll get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.
Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers
1. Splash Page
3. Image and Flash Content
4. Overuse of Ajax
5. Versioning of Theme Design6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text
7. Common Title Tag MistakesSame or similar title text:
Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:
Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title
Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356
General SEO Do’s and Don’ts
Let me tell you WHAT TO DO by telling you WHAT NOT TO DO:
Don’t Ignore Your Audience
Write about topics your audience cares about. Like what? Find out, by conducting a poll (like I did), scan some relevant bulletin boards or forums, look for common topics in customer emails, or do some keyword research. There are great free keyword tools like the Google Keyword Tool or SEO Book’s Keyword Tool and loads more. The plan is not to spend your life doing keyword research but just to get a general idea of what your visitors are interested in.