As a web designer there are a few things that go without saying:
- Make code neat
- Make site accessible
- Deliver content
But there is a whole world of strategy and techniques that go far beyond the simply placing of tags and aligning divs. There is the murky realm of beating out the competition and using the acronym – SEO.
Symbolic Erratic Origin?
Semantic Emphasis Object?
Search Engine Optimization. I know some of you are yawning and looking to see if there is a better article further down the page. The fact is that SEO is big business. There are thousands of companies that do SEO consultation as their primary business.
But why the fuss? Well how do most people find a website? Either direct knowledge of the website (in which case you don’t need to worry about anything but content) or through using a search engine, primarily Google and now, more and more, Bing.
The secrets to scoring well on a search engine are not exactly well kept but the implementation of these tips to the extreme makes the web experience much less enjoyable. The main goals of SEO are to cluster keywords, make pages spider friendly, and get as many top 10 results as possible. Think about it. When was the last time you went to page 2 of Google results?
The issue becomes one of ethics more when you start talking about individual landing pages and rewriting content, not merely for clarity, but for search engine score. It used to be that people would meta keyword stuff or make invisible text the same color as the background. Search engines grew wise. Now it is more about content stuffing and multiple page creation.
The idea behind design (and usually good writing) is to communicate clearly and efficiently (read:brief). Good SEO work means having the same keyword 4 or 5 times in the same body text. How many times can you put in “Milwaukee’s Best Enchilada” in the same body text?
The truth is that eventually the cream floats to the top, so that if you are really good, no matter how much SEO your competitor does or how little you do the most linked to and visited sites will climb to the top. But if there is no true forerunner, SEO may make the difference between a top 10 listing and a top result – which can mean thousands of clicks.
