SEO (mis)adventures

There are so many important aspects involved in pulling together an awesome website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just one of them. It is one that I have been emphasizing in my continuing educational endeavors and reflected at my Victoria BC based freelance web design site www.victoria-web-design.ca. I have learned some lessons, both about what to do and what not to do, and thought that I would pass some of them on here. Many of my clients ask for sweeping changes to the text on their 'home' pages, or ask for no text and all pictures, or ask that I include all of the 137 key words on their list etc.

In many businesses the mantra is 'The customer is always right'. In web design, unless the customer builds websites and studies web design and SEO techniques, the customer is rarely right. Even experienced web designers who aren't keeping up to date on what the major search engines are looking for can make near fatal flaws that can cost you business.

First, let's talk about Google. About 70% of searches on the web are done through Google. Next popular is Yahoo, and then Bing. All the rest make up a tiny fraction of the search market. Google has the most intricate algorithms out there. That means that if you are pleasing Google, you're pleasing them all. For the purposes of this post, I will refer to search engines as Google.

Tip number one (What you should do)
If you're like me, if you read instructions at all, you read a few lines...peruse around a bit and then jump in like you know what's what. Learn from my mistake if you will and READ THE RULES. Google's Webmaster Guidelines gives you everything you need to know to not make any fatal flaws.

Tip number one (What you should NOT do)
Never Never Never under any circumstances or in any way try to hide text on your site either with code or with CSS. Yes, Google searches your CSS as well as your code. I thought I learned a great 'trick' when studying an online CSS template. It was a very clean looking site because it had lots of negative space, lots of simple, modern graphic elements and very little text to muck up the visual. However, in the code i found that they had text for SEO offset by -10,000 pixels in the CSS. There was no malicious intent on my part. I simply wanted to present a 'clean' visual to the web surfer, and effective SEO for the Google 'bots. My site was not banned, but it certainly was penalized.

When I searched for my exact domain name, the site came up. but if I searched for every one of my exact keywords, the site didn't show in the top 400 results! ouch!

Next post we'll talk about keyword do's and don'ts.

Be. Now.

Paul