SEO – Don’t Redesign If It Is Not Necessary

Let’s stop for a moment and look at the real rift that builds in the misunderstanding of website design as it relates to SEO. For the technologically astute, please humor us for a few moments. For the business owner that has hired on, or engaged the services of multiple “website designers” solely for the purpose of attaining better placement or “rank” in the search engine page results, this posting is for you.

It may seem like all the verbiage, even on this website, is too confusing to understand as far as what this gray area, this fuzzy thing called SEO is all about. We have tried really hard to keep the techno-speak down to a minimum on this website for your benefit. We want you to understand so that you don’t spin your wheels.

We do not want you to hook up with another website design firm so that just maybe they have the right stuff to get your site to the top of the search engine page results and that maybe your potential clients can find you and will contact your company for your services. A website design firm is not an SEO firm, necessarily. The two endeavors are related and a company that does one can certainly do the other, but for all the hours of design and painstaking work that goes into a quality website, provisions for SEO need to be in place every step of the way. This is all too often not the case, as if the optimizing part can be done later.

It can be done later but there is always re-hashing of old content, internal structure and pages so it is really better if the whole project can be done at once. Usually, a company specializes in one discipline or the other or if a company is large enough, separate departments can be employed for the desired results.

SEO, short for “search engine optimization” is a separate type of specialty and a certain focus upon current trends in the internet and search engine placement must be in place because of the waves of changes we see daily in the search engine technology. Today, the best method for staging a website roll-out is to have the SEO professional follow the very astute designer in the process of working a website to its fullest potential for search engine placement. The SEO specialist needs to take an SEO optimized website and begin to tweak it and work in the associated back-linking strategies and check for internal linking, etc. Most website designers are familiar with much of the basics and will provide optimized work for the SEO specialist.

Today’s climate requires copywriters to be employed by the SEO practitioner for the full implementation of an SEO campaign. Leveraging content is now a vital part of getting your website to the top in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and a few carefully crafted pages will no longer do for permanent ranking strategies. We have competition in the SEO field and your competitors will be working to overtake your website and push you down to the second page of the SERPS.

A good design form will have an SEO specialist and sometimes you will find a specialist that can deliver on both elements. One without the other is a waste anyway you look at it. If you have a good and functioning website but have been passed by in search engine ranking, an SEO professional is who you need to call. Another website redesign will not work in and of itself. If you want to start over, remember that site structure being changed may hurt you in the loss of the exposure that you already have. If you have had an amateur working old linking schemes, stop right now and contact a professional to take inventory of your current situation. You website could be ruined for the search engines for some time to come and undoing amateur work that is very hard to track down all over the internet can be a disaster and starting over may be a hard choice to that has to be made. Before you redesign however, allow an SEO specialist to take a look and to analyze your particular situation.

A website that cannot be found is no good to anyone. Usually, turning around an existing website and keeping the good elements in place can achieve more than you could imagine. You don’t change your engine in your car if it only needs a tune-up.

We are seeing web designers that are selling complete rebuilds that do not produce any more sales leads than the old website they replaced. We are seeing this quite often. Let us take a look free of charge and offer you what you need, rather than opting for duplication of work already done. Yes, we may have to fix some things, but does not that make more sense than spending money on what you don’t need?

-Bob W

Flash Mobs: Power of Social Media Exemplified in Philadelphia-

April 2, 2010

Social Media is taking off among the youth but also within all communities as the popularity of these sites increases. People frequent these new doorways to the internet. As they share their interests and day-to-day happenings with each other, people are flocking to these sites. One can communicate with hundreds or even thousands of friends in a few keystrokes.

Never has the world seen such a network that literally has the power to engage the human spirit so effectively. We may see entire governments overthrown by these sites one day. When it comes to likes and dislikes, everyone is not the of same vein and debate is natural. Entire communities of folks interested in topics that range the gamut, daily communicate on the internet to share information and links to interesting sites.

The power of this raw force of networking has been seen in the city of Philadelphia of late, as in other parts of the country. So called, “Flash Mobs,” are appearing and causing disruption, damage and problems across the city of Philadelphia. Youth that are looking for action and are able to communicate by way of their hand-held devices on the networking sites and gather in mass to disrupt a given area of the city at will.

This is about the power of these sites and that people can communicate with each other in real time. It is no mystery that the sites more fluid in nature like Facebook and Twitter are more poplar to people looking to engage. How can a business harness the power of these sites to increase sales?

These sites like Facebook and Twitter use a global “nofollow” attribute in their “robots.txt” and generally links are considered dead to the machines that crawl the web. My opinion is that they are picked up and crawled anyway by big search. There is some debate about this. The links on many of these fluid sites that use the global “nofollow” designation do not, however get indexed in the search engines. Some sites linked to these sites are indexed by search engines. Take “Digg,” for instance and sites like it that allow spider crawling. These are prime real estate for well written articles and links to interesting sites. Again content reigns supreme and the same link bait ideas are attractive to the social networking folks that share an interest in your good or service.

As stated before, big search will continue to harness the happenings on these social sites so that the search engines remain valid in the internet experience. The power being wielded by these sites has unleashed an attraction to them by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Although the chaff that is known as spam is always going to be prevalent, the social sites are working hard to prevent it and the human element is heavily employed to cancel out the spam artisans. Take “Slashdot” for an example as it marks articles as spam until they are voted upwards by readers to raise them to a page of higher ranking.

So, we must ask if the social sites are helping the quality of big search or are they becoming entities all their own and threatening big search. I think the latter, but as long as people need a place to search for items on the internet, the search engine will remain viable. Google and Yahoo and Bing may be reduced in their ability to garner revenue from pay-per-click listings as copywriting will take on a role that will empower businesses to convey their messages in other ways. One thing is for sure and that is that the old linking schemes are dying a slow death right before our eyes. Another is that quality in site copy will rise to a level of significance never seen before.