Where web designers focus on the creative effort of designing a website that is attractive and making your products a services appeal to buyers. The SEO persons focus is on what it takes to make a website appeal to the search algorithms and understand how to prevent loss of rank when an existing site is replaced.

Where does SEO fit in the design process?

Before you design, Audit.

A Website Audit will evaluate competitors’ sites and your site to determine what is and isn’t working. The Audit will explore the most important words in your industry and develop a strategy and structure to provide the best exposure for those terms to the search engines.

Prior to Launch, Tune.

A pre-launch optimization pass should be made to tune title tags, page titles, page names, and meta-descriptions. This will boost relevancy for your content, improving how your content appears in search results and improve your click through rate (CTR).

Incoming links to your pages should be evaluated and then redirects created that will focus those links on the most appropriate new pages. This will assure that any existing page rank isn’t lost on content that can no longer be found.

Analytics should be installed on the news site. Using the same tracking code as the previous site will make it easy to evaluate the effects of the changes and compare the old site to the new site, month over month and year over year.

When you Launch, Notify.

A new sitemap should be created to be sure search engines can find all your new content. Google should be notified if your domain name is changing and Google Webmaster tools settings made to configure any URL preferences, and set the primary county, if you are not marketing worldwide.

After Launch – Follow up, Maintain, and Tweak.

If you are using a content management system (CMS), it should be kept up date with the latest revisions to reduce the likelihood of being hacked. Google Analytics should be reviewed to measure the effectiveness of paid and organic marketing efforts. Content that converts may merit off-site marketing and content that doesn’t convert re-evaluated.

Google’s Webmaster Tools should be checked routinely to evaluate the effectiveness of the effort. Done correctly, missing page (404) errors should be minimal and errors should fall off dramatically as cached content is flushed from the page cache of the popular search engines.

This has long been a problem on large database driven sites where only a minor difference in the address (URL) of the content (perhaps only a session ID) makes it appear that the same information is on more than one page. However this is also a common problem on Blogs where a Category listing, Tag listing, or Archive listing can present the exact same content, but with differing addresses.

This looks at some ways that duplicate content can occur.

1) True Duplicates – Any page that is 100% identical to another page other than the page’s address (URL).
This could result from that session ID id issue I mentioned:

2) Near Duplicates – Pages that differs only slightly, perhaps only an image or sidebar is different.
This could occur from differing sorts of the same information (category, tag, archive, …):

3) Cross-domain Duplicates -Occurs when two websites share the same piece of content.
This could occur from just shear theft (someone scraping your content) or from syndicating articles:

While the SEO crowd has been preaching the pitfalls of duplicate content for sometime, the farmer or “panda” updates that occurred throughout 2011 have pushed the importance of keeping duplicate content off your site this to the forefront. Peter Meyers covers the topic in more detail here, along with some ways to address these problems.

A good website is more than just a great landing page and some additional media. In fact, a great website should have at the bare minimum:

The Ability to Create a Good First Impression

The look of your website is everything. If the site’s design doesn’t look professional, you can guarantee that potential clients will be quick to hit the back button. To make sure that you capture quick conversions, go the extra mile and pay for a professional design.

Excellent Content

Content is essentially one of the best forms of SEO available, and every website needs to make sure that it is posting relevant articles. Not only does web content need to pertain to the site itself, but it also needs to be interesting and informative. Great content will keep readers coming back, with drive up rankings, and will overall increase business.

Easy Usability

If your site is a pain to navigate through, you will quickly lose business. If users struggle to find the information that they need about your organization or products, they will move on to your competitors. Make sure all information pertinent to your business is easy to get to, if not on the primary landing page.

SEO

Titles and meta titles and descriptions are important when producing a SEO friendly site. Also the phrases used within your content and links to your site are highly important when trying to raise your site’s rank in the search engines. If you are struggling with getting your site to the top, don’t be afraid to hire a professional. In the same way that it is difficult to compete for business against sites that are professionally designed, it is difficult for a business to compete in the search results against sites that have had professional SEO help.

Social Aspects

Every website also needs to have a Facebook and Twitter page, as well as accounts on various other social networking sites, to remain effective. It doesn’t take paid surveys for business owners to know that everyone is chatting through social media, and one of the best ways to drive business to your site is by linking your social media accounts to your business’s primary landing page.

Getting ahead on the web is a bit difficult, but with the right site design, some SEO work, and social media integration, business owners allow themselves the opportunity to get ahead of their competition. If you find that your site is lagging behind, take the above tips and analyze your site. You may find that a few quick tweaks to content or simply signing up for a social networking account was all your business needed to raise its rank on the major search engines.

Highland Hardware had an unhappy customer and despite their best efforts to resolve the issue the customer was still unhappy. However when the customer struck out at them publicly, its owner and founder Chris Bagby took action and sending this letter to his customer base:

I am on their mailing list and have been a customer for more than 20 years. I have only good things to say about them, both from the standpoint of customer service and the quality of the tools they sell. So when I received this letter, I was only too happy to cast my vote. When I did, it was around noon and there were less than 10 total reviews. When I checked about 5 hours later the number had grown to over 300. Every one I read was 4 or 5 star review and completely burring the bad review.

I think there are a couple of things that here that are of note, first the letter from the owner explains in a frank way what had happened. Second, he invites others to leave a review based on their experience. It is clear from the response that Highland Hardware has a track record among its customers of good service and products that its customers were happy to share.

…an easy road to go down, until those chickens come home to roost.

1. Jolting – When someone clicks an unidentified link to a PDF, there is a jolting effect on the user. It can create that moment of ‘oh crud, did I just click on SPAM, or is this ad popping up or ??.
2. Slow Load Times – If someone clicks into PDF content directly from a search result, they may experience extended download times and leave before reaching the
   content.
3. No Navigation – If someone clicks into PDF content directly from a search result, there is no navigation to the rest of your website. So if it the content of the PDF is generating traffic to your site, there are no links to Home, About us, or
   Contact pages.
4. No Tracking – You cannot install tracking codes in a PDF, so If someone clicks into PDF content directly from a search result, you have no way to identify how often it occurring or track the source of visits to PDF pages.

Best Practices:

• Never use a PDF as a primary sources of information on your website.
• If a PDF is needed, link and identify the PDF as a “print version” of the material so the user can anticipate the lag to download and display the document.
• Place PDF files in a /pdf folder, and include a disallow flag in your Robot.txt file to keep that content out of the search
  results.

While your website may be optimized for the many of the phrases in your space, I am always able to find phases to drive incremental business. In addition an AdWords campaign is a great way to test and evaluate ad copy to find out what messages are best at capturing and converting new business.

This is a great video on the subject:

If you would like help getting started, I can help you get set up, configure your campaign, create ad copy and optimize to help you get the most from your ad dollar.  AdWords is a pay per click model, so you only pay when your ad is clicked …and to help out, Google has just sent me a stack of $100 coupons to help businesses open accounts and get started!