Yes, I really do mean to go on about this until I am blue in the face.
As you know, TSDG build sites with search engines in mind – if we’re allowed to.
Who stops us? Sorry to say this; the client. We have explained elsewhere that we need your copy before we build your site. This is so we can determine the keyword density of each page and then, to make a long story short, we can use those keywords in the building of the page. And before you ask, no – this can’t be done once the site is built.
However, time and time again, this doesn’t happen because the client doesn’t appreciate just how vital this step is. My powers of persuasion, if indeed I have any, sometimes fail to emphasize the importance of this.
I found this interesting article today and excerpts are below. My comments in bold!
Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google
By Jason Lee Miller
This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques.
1. Title tags
Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
I agree wholeheartedly with Jason here, and to say it yet again, it's one of the reasons we need your copy – the final copy – before we build.
2. Content
… it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should be natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
Once again, this is a reason why we need your copy as soon as possible so that we can adjust the keyword density, if required (and it almost always is).
3. Quality Links
Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
Agreed and this IS something that you can do yourself to improve your site’s visibility.
4. Quantity Links
Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
Ditto.
5. URL
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
Sorry to harp on like this but can you now see why we need to determine your keywords from your copy before we name pages???
6. Spider Food
Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
If I had a dollar for every time I have told a client this. Look, here is a ***GUY*** telling you. Do you believe it now?
7. Site Architecture
There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. This is why we have blueprints and why carefully-named pages are put into carefully-named directories. You know what I’m going to say ..
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
Yet another ‘if I had a dollar’ comment.
9. Start a Blog
A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.
Yes, I agree with Jason but I wonder if Jason actually deals with clients? Does he know how hard it can be to get basic web copy from clients? I wonder how many clients he has who will commit themselves to writing in a daily blog? He is absolutely right, blog posts are picked up by Google in a matter of hours – if you can be bothered to do it. Why do you think THIS blog exists???
10. Don't Forget Humans
This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.
I can save you the trouble. I have been reading every word written by Jakob Nielsen every since he started writing. So here’s an idea. Don’t spend the year or so it would take to read everything Nielsen has ever written; I’ve done that job for you. Just trust me to build your site properly. And …. you know what’s coming … BELIEVE me when I tell you that I need your copy before we build your site!
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