Depending on the amount of time you spend poking about on websites, social media, etc one of the hot topics is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it is tweeted and posted and whatever you call it, here there and everywhere.
To the uninitiated SEO is the process you follow to make a website more attractive to surfers – that is to say it’s ability to be found and viewed rather than populated with nice pictures, colours and effects.
In web design the principles of KISS are always a good building block for applying to your websites – as such you can follow the same for your SEO – start with the simple stuff, add in the more complicated stuff later if you must!
I am planning to go into more detail on here (insofar as I can!) with each stage of the process as I work through our main site (good place for a plug) http://www.islesofscilly-travel.co.uk, which has recently been upgraded, but only in technology and a design sense, content is still largely unchanged, so in updating that we will be looking at the SEO also.
In a nutshell SEO is concerned with getting your customers to your site and keeping them there.
Back when I was a developer/designer our sales guys would pitch the concept of how the best looking website on the internet could be anonymous if it’s not correctly built with tags, links, accessibility and so on (Don’t worry if this is too complex reading now, I’m going to go into fine detail in future posts) and that’s still true – imagine if you had spent several thousands of pounds on a website only for it to be visited infrequently.
I’m sure that there are lots of ethical designers out there who will take offence to this and who do consider SEO when building sites for their customers – but for every one there are bound to be others who don’t. We had an SEO company working for us who gave us nice analytics each month but didn’t really focus on target marketing/advertising and let some really basic website design issues go unnoticed for months, and this was costing us £700 a month!
It’s true that even the most plain website can work well if it’s setup and deployed with an eye towards SEO, if your site is easily found on the internet and it’s content and message are clear and understandable then you will attract the visitors – it remains to be seen if they actually want to use your service/buy your product! But that is outside the realms of SEO.
The goal of any corporate website is to promote the business (and in some cases offer the sale of products) and the more people see the site and take in the information the better.
So posts tagged here with SEO will see the continuance of the theme, and hopefully I will write in such a way that you can apply some of the techniques therein to your advantage.