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SEO Search Engine Optimisation
Got a great website but no-one visits
it? Get a little help from Simply Website Designs and get people visiting
your website. Here is an article by Baron Turner which describes how having
a website is NOT enough!! You need to add keywords, links and text to your
site, to get seen by Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
Many sites on the web are amazing – a real
tribute to their designers. Many of these are attractive, functional and
compelling for visitors. But look a little deeper and we see a consistent
problem with search engine ranking possibilities across many sites. The
snazzy site’s creators are good at their job. Their job is site creation.
They also generally think they understand site prioritization but screw up
their clients SEO such that the search engine optimization effort is
multiplied through re-work and necessary architectural changes. The main
issues are URL manipulation, duplicate content and a serious downside of
popular shopping cart software products. Related issues are potentially
endless, particularly with future site changes/overhauls and their abandoned
URL’s that have desirable search engine clout.
The Cause Leading to the Effect
Since people in business generally have a skill base that doesn’t include
web site design, they dip into the sizable pool of inexpensive web creator
talent around. They’ve heard of SEO, but their chosen web design companies
who produce dazzling samples of work along with shopping carts say they will
create the site in line with SEO principles. Great! Once producing a great
looking site that works superbly, works with the shopping cart, demonstrably
has customers going through the shopping cart and parting with their funds,
has products easy to add and subtract through an external interface with the
database – the customer is pleased and pays the bill after agreeing the
ongoing fee structure with amendments and changes. And start a PPC campaign.
And realize that the cost of the PPC campaign is about the same as their
premises rental at their high street but with a huge cost increase at
Christmas time. And realize that now they have two landlords – their High St
Premises owner and Google (and/or Yahoo, MSN, etc…). Or, they realize that
whilst they thought that with their new online company the web would be
free, they, like their real estate counterparts, have an expensive landlord
of the search masters, led by the ‘benevolent’ Google. But no matter – just
have to wait a while until the organic results show their site highly
through the efforts of those clever people that created this great site –
just wait a few weeks… months… years. Here’s why it’s going to be years…
decades... never. And here’s how to make it, realistically, a few months.
Unfriendly URL
The URL problem is not limited to the use of shopping cart software like OS
Commerce and others that make use of session ID’s, although they are default
offenders. Some web design companies compound the problem with the use of
session ID’s apart from their shopping cart software, or use ‘cart created’
session ID’s throughout their design. Session ID’s are a handy means of
keeping state and identity across several pages for a particular user’s
sequence of pages within the domain per session. The main fully featured
shopping cart – OS Commerce - which is free and hence attractive – appends a
session ID to every page. The ID is unique to every user session (so if the
user closes the browser and re-starts a session on a site the ID will be
different). See an example of this with natural figures(dot)co(dot)uk. Go to
any category and see the session ID appended. Now close the browser and open
the same URL again – note that the session ID has changed for the same pages
selected. What’s the problem with this? When the Google bot or any other
SE’s bot comes along to examine the page – it sees the page with appended
session ID and indexes the page. Then the next time it visits the page it
lands on the same page and sees the same content, but this time for a
different apparent URL – which is the same URL with a different session ID
appended. What’s this? Duplicate content! Most web designers have little
understanding of why this would ever be a problem.
A similar issue of duplicate content exists with the way that most web
designers have internal links to some start file like index.htm. Back to the
home page? Go to thedomain/index.htm. But this is the same content as
thedomain.com. But there‘s more. Not only are these pages the same, but also
http://thedomain and http://www.thedomain are also the same content. To
demonstrate the SE’s viewing this as different, try it with xe(dot)com and
note the different PageRank scores. It’s easy to fix these problems, it’s
just that web designers are generally oblivious to the problem.
Site Redesigns, Wasted Pages
Occasionally, like your living room, the site needs an overhaul. Or it could
be that some web designer believes that the way to higher ranking for their
client is to redesign the site because they’ve heard that page names should
have hyphens, not underscores, or that page names shouldn’t have hyphens but
should have underscores (it doesn’t matter a hoot). In the redesign – many
web designers destroy any search engine clout currently enjoyed and end up
with a negative affect for the site. Oh well. At least it looks much nicer
after the redesign
What are web designers missing? As SE’s traverse a page they analyze it and
index it assuming it doesn’t offend them in some way (cloaking, dup content,
redirects defined in the wrong way, etc.). It’s indexed. Got that? Indexed.
That is, the page – referred to by its URL – now exists in some database
patrolled by Google’s armed guards. When web designers change a site design
and invent new page names without properly redirecting from the old page,
Google see another shiny new page – note that it has exactly the same
content as another on the same domain they already have indexed – and index
the new page too. Only now the site is devalued in the eyes of the search
engine because it clearly duplicates content. This is not anywhere near as
serious as duplicate content across distinct domains, but is still a red
flag when seen within a domain. But wait – it’s not duplicate content! The
old page has been changed – sure – it still exists because there may be
external links to it – but there are no internal links to the page – it’s
been replaced by the new page. But did anyone tell Google about that? What?!
How do you tell Google about anything? By a properly defined 301 redirect in
the htaccess file. Hmmm. Try that on your web designer – if there’s the
slightest questioning lift of eyebrows – run. But the problem doesn’t end
there; since this is now a new page, it doesn’t have the establishment of
the old page. The SE doesn’t know it’s a replacement, it just thinks it’s a
new page, something that has to earn it’s place through time and new
internal and external links. The htaccess 301 redirect resolves all this.
The Solution
A popular web presence is no longer the breeze it used to be. Everyone
flocks to the web – but how do the SE’s sort out the wheat from the chaff?
The solution to this and much more is the design of pages from the start
with SEO principles in mind. But this has become a buzz-phrase. The web
designers need to understand how search engines see pages as well as how
humans see pages. Let’s face it – if SEO’s designed all the web sites it
wouldn’t be pretty. Both skills are needed. For proof of this see the site
cited in the bio box for this article – as site which to prove an SEO point
is distinctively un-pretty. But the SEO’s have the upper hand. They know
they aren’t designers and they know they need clever artistic designers to
build something that is not just functional but also attractive. The
converse is not generally true. Web designers in general don’t really
understand search engine optimisation – despite their sales people’s sale
oriented claims. They think they know the SEO science. We’ve yet to find a
web designer who does. |
