Comments on: SEO 101: Valuing SEO-Conscious Web Design

By: Kyle Healey

Kyle Healey — Mon, 26 May 2008 10:22:55 +0000

Great article cshel, stumbled!

By: jun - a seo

jun - a seo — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:08:53 +0000

this is a common problem with web designers and seo’s. they have different approaches in the development of a site. i hope that web designers should also include seo,specially on site opt. so that we could just focus on offsite optimization strategies.

By: Adam Landrum

Adam Landrum — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:20:08 +0000

Ah, I’d be the first to argue for business results. However, SEO is not the end all. It’s a piece of the puzzle. Conversion, too, is not the end all. Quite an important piece. The sum of the parts to achieve the business goal is what we’re looking for, and typically, one of those parts is branding. So a page with no or bad design that still gets “conversions” may be good in the short term, but may prove not so swell for the long term.

It’s a balance, and if we had to go to extremes, sure, I’d vote for conversions. But since we rarely have to live in extreme-land, why not go for the cake and eat it too and have great web design (branding) with great SEO?

By: shelah@zug.com

shelah@zug.com — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:25:29 +0000

Fantastic article!

We’ve been doing humor hook linkbait on the web since 1995 at Zug.com

It would be great to get your feedback on the comedy linkbait angle!

Shelah
Marketing Assistant
http://www.zug.com/us/about/link-baiting.html

By: links for 2008-01-25

links for 2008-01-25 — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:23:33 +0000

[...] SEO 101: Valuing SEO-Conscious Web Design | Cshel SEO and PR From the question, it sounds like his clients are small to medium sized businesses that either aren’t ready for a full blown SEO specialist or don’t have the budget for a dedicated SEO person right now. (tags: blog Business Marketing SEO) [...]

By: Rajat Garg

Rajat Garg — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:31:38 +0000

Communication gap is a big problem as well as finding a designer who really knows about SEO.

By: New Orleans SEO

New Orleans SEO — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:28:03 +0000

Very good points, most web designers don’t bother with seo when making a web site, and as an seo I have to spend a great deal of time cleaning-up their code. When people hire a web designer they should ask if the designer keeps seo in mind and if they will consider how the site is crawled when the information is organized in the code. That is why we all loved absolute position CSS, you could place the search engine friendly information first.

By: Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing

Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:40:01 +0000

You hit on something major here, which is the communication gap between SEOs and designers. Would be great if someone would write a manual on how these two should interact…

By: andy

andy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:40:11 +0000

But if you you do that…then, when you get paid for seo?

By: Scott Clark

Scott Clark — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:11:44 +0000

Nice!

These considerations are critical for any site, but my experience is that it takes hard numbers (analytics) in order to dislodge the pattern of “make me a site like that one” approach.

People are always astounded when you can show them a landing page with 14-20% conversion rate that has almost no design at all to it. EVEN AFTER the numbers are shown, I get fights by people saying “I don’t like the way it looks.”

Much love for decision makers who say “I don’t care what you “like”, mr./ms. pretty pictures, we’re designing for business success and long term, word-of-mouth marketing of our brand.”

Sadly, this is exceedingly rare.

SMALL companies can take full advantage of these concepts once they get over the fact that they don’t need to win a Webby to succeed. Spending more of your budget on SEM/SEO/SMM is very often a far better way to use limited funds – I don’t care if your site is 2 pages of text…. if it makes the phone ring, SMBs are happy.