A designer’s perspective on SEO
…written by Alex and has 7 comments so far
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is definitely one of the more notorious online disciplines, often badged as a ‘black art’ due to the uncertainty linked with achieving a good ranking in natural search listings. (By natural search listings, I’m basically discounting Google adwords, Pay Per Click and anything else which basically involves you buying your place in the charts)
Always Intrigued by the science behind it, I have played with optimising sites with surprisingly good results. My first agency still sits at the top of Google for ‘Web design Leeds’ after my efforts, and my previous place of work holds the same much coveted spot for ‘Web design Harrogate’ - both of which are pretty competitive search terms and should supposedly bring out the ‘pros’ to battle due to the nature of the terms.
So, how did I do this? Did I spend hours submitting sites to search engines? Did I e-mail countless people asking for them to link back to my sites? Did I flood the page with the all important keywords? Well, actually none of the above. I just designed sites people talked about and built them cleanly and properly structured, and then let the power of good design do the rest – a process which I’ve found is much more valuable than investing hundreds or thousands of pounds retrospectively on a poorly designed and built website.
So, I’ve decided to run a little SEO experiment with the new Engage website. It’s only been live for a few weeks and is a complete newcomer to the SEO battle. Using just my ‘good-practice’ web design I’ll be trying to climb the leaderboard to the #1 spot for ‘Web design harrogate’ initially and track progress with the fantasic (and free) tool, webceo. I’ll probably spend no more than 5-10 minutes a day to just monitor the position and make tweaks here and there – and prove that you don’t need to invest a small fortune on your site post launch, but rather get it done right in the first place by people like us.
Tags: SEO
Allen Taylor Says:
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
May 14th, 2008 at 3:34 pmAlex Says:
Thanks Allen, and welcome to the RSS
Hopefully see you around more often.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:31 pmAlice Says:
Alex, you are absolutely right – web design MUST go with SEO. It is great when designers understand that a website need to be not only beautiful, but crowleble and usable!
May 16th, 2008 at 7:42 amKen Stanley Says:
I couldn’t agree more, Alex. One of my own sites Hunt for Property has just been ranked 2nd for searches for the keyword property. I spent a little while doing some basic on-site SEO stuff about a year ago and very little since. The niche is massively competitive as well, with very popular sites like Daft.ie and MyHome.ie (recently acquired for €50m by The Irish Times) ranking below my own site. At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, I’m actually not – I’m just trying to make a point. The point being, no matter how much cash you pump into SEO, you can never really tell how Google’s algorithms are going to change and where you’re going to eventually end up on the SERP’s. SEO as a stand-alone service is complete nonsense. Dodgy snake oil IMO.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pmSteven Hambleton Says:
Hi there!
How many top companies would you say there were in Harrogate? I know I could count them via Google but what of the obscure ones too?
Where I am based there are about 20.
August 12th, 2008 at 7:39 am