7 Deadly SEO Sins Of Web Design Companies
I was intending to take a break for a while – and focus on some of the excellent seo jobs we have on at the moment. However….
We’re working with a web development company just now who wants to charge my friend who runs rehab, for the expensive bespoke CMS creating unique page titles. WTF? It’s 2009. My response was:
They want to charge YOU for creating dynamic titles? You should be charging THEM for telling them how to build websites properly.
A website design company is not responsible for getting you trafic to your site, but I wonder if they are liable or responsible for preventing you getting the traffic from Google you deserve, and Google wants to give you? After all you are paying a lot of money for a online shop for instance and Google tells people how to build a basic site it will like:
Create unique, accurate page titles – GOOGLE STARTER GUIDE
Here’s a list of the most common problems I encounter when customers approach us and ask us to audit their site:
- Duplicate Page Titles – Every Page on your site should have a unique page title and a unique meta description – a site killer for sites with low link equity, large in pages, and thin on page content.
- Duplicate Meta Descriptions – Every Page on your site should have a unique meta description – not a site killer, but useful. (Addition – I’ve added this, while not a killer mistake, it’s indicitive of autogenerating/generic population of things the site should not be doing) – Tip, if you can’t be bothered putting a meta description in yourself, leave it out. Don’t autogenerate stuff like this. Meta descriptions are for humans, not Google, IMO.
- Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is problematic – ensure every page is necessary and only primary content is spidered (ie not the PDF or text only version of a page)
- Building A Navigation System Google Cant Follow – Make sure Google can read your navigation system and so your content – Flash websites for instance can cause big problems in Google, even today.
- Building A Site Structure That Does Not Emphasise Important Content – Create a site structure for your website eg Home/ Categories/ Subcategory / Products Google can spider – Don’t make a linear navigation route to content that means you have to click 6 times to get to a product page
- Sloppy Interlinking causing canonical issues – Google can screw up a bit if you are giving it canonical woes and even have went as far to support a canonical tag to help
- Building A Site with A Lot Of Fancy CSS, the result being a lot of what Google will determine ‘Hidden Content’ and actually penalise un-trusted sites
The client is responsible for getting links to a website, which makes it rank, and is responsible for adding keyword targetted content to the site to make it a valuable resource, but I wonder if you would agree a website design company that professes to know little about SEO should know these basic 7 things that could really help a client’s website succeed without pricey seo to fix basic ‘errors’.
Lordy! Pity too, the web design company in question has build a solid site, but basic google-unfriendly woes will nuke it in rankings. So what is the point?
There’s plenty of free advice out there, including the free seo guide for beginners we publish.
ADDED – Here’s another 7 deadly sins of web dev companies – a slightly different slant – a user perspecive. This is a cool article too about the seven deadly sins of seo.
Right, back to work…..
Written by Shaun Anderson
Unbelievable, charging extra for something easily done with a few lines of PHP or WordPress. Reminds me of a fellow who told me his firm used tables for layout instead of CSS and didn’t bother to adhere to W3C Web standards because it would cost more and clients didn’t ask for it. One shouldn’t have to charge extra to do things properly. And the client isn’t the expert, they shouldn’t be expected to know what things are necessary…if they did they wouldn’t need to hire us!
Getting a page to look a certain way in a browser is only a small fraction of the real design process. While Web Designers come in all shapes and sizes, with many specializing in different things, even ones not well-versed in SEO should be using proper semantic mark-up, logical interfaces and other basics that support SEO, usability and accessibility.
Ouch, feel your pain.
It’s fairly common to come across client with a custom CMS system that doesn’t allow customisation for key onsite elements needed in SEO. I know we come across them all the time. It’s frustrating to say the least, and having to justify the costs of the changes is a tough fight (and it’s always the small things, what we see as basics, that cause so much drama)
It’s definitely what seperates the SEM industry to those in the development industry (well, my opinion at least, without the cross over between the 2). Why change what works, that can be setup with minimal effort, get the cash in the door and off to the next project. While in the SEM world, we spend large volumes of time researching, testing and updating strategies to make sure we are up to date and ahead in our game.
With you (nearly) all the way on this Shaun. I come across all of these regularly when looking at clients’ sites. If one more person tells me that their content management system is of course SEO-friendly (usually with some additional plug-in) I think I’ll scream.
I do wonder about item 7 though – what techniques do you have in mind here? I use advanced CSS all the time but only ever for positive reasons. If it doesn’t produce elegant code it’s off my list.
Only thing I would add to this list is one that kills so many sites – 302 redirects. In fact I see them so often that I’d put it near the top of the list. .Net sites seem to use 302s by default at every opportunity and few .Net programmers even seem to be aware they exist.
You make an excellent point with 302 redirects (the default redirect on a lot of systems I encounter).
Regarding CSS, I mean when it’s an amzing looking site, and you look at the code and realise it’s a 20 page site with 19 pages hidden and presented via CSS/Ajax and you look at it and thing:
OK – so this is one page with 19 hidden pages of content. Great looking site Google will hate – saw one of those just last week, totally unsuitable for the client in question.
By the way, I purposely never put “building a website with frames” as companies using Frames to build websites should be immediately LIQUIDATED…. somehow, and I don’t mean by market forces!
Ahh, got your drift now Shaun – I’m allergic to Ajax too!! A couple of tabbed-style switchable divs to help the user interface is one thing – 20 pages of hidden content, particularly with Ajax, is quite another.
I did once build a website in frames, and because I knew the right way to do it it was very successful in Google (and Alta Vista) – but that was in the second half of the 1990s!! Frightning that anyone is still doing it now.
canonical issues are the bain of my life!
Some good points up there Shaun, any web designer worth half his salt should be doing these things. Someone people just never learn do they?
I laugh seeing web designers who claim to be experts and they are using tables for layout and hidden bits and javascript navigation. Some people eh!
Btw i got my seo guide this morning, great book, i look forward to getting stuck into it!
Thanks
T
Awesome post, I couldn’t agree more. SEO is often one of the first words on our clients’ lips (although many of them begin by saying they need it and then they ask what it is).
Another thing I see with a lot of CMS systems is slow page-load times. Some really popular CMS systems almost audibly creak when they try to load a page. WTF?? A snazzy design along with some text and media shouldn’t result in donkey-speed.
When we built our CMS, readable URLs and editable page titles, meta description and keywords were first on the list of ‘things to do’. We still spend time trying to get even fast page-load times, too (but I think that might be because we’re competitive dorks)
Thanks again for the post, good stuff…
Hi Shaun
I know we have not managed to meet yet, but I must congratulate you on this blog, and I know that both of us are very much in tune on this subject. The business world has to realise there is much more to putting a website in place rather than just being directed by a website design company. We know what their first step will be, and that is to get out the ‘eye candy’ portfolio and say “do you want us to build one of these”. Web developers need to talk to professional SEO company’s who approach the whole build and design of a website differently than your average website mechanic!
Good to see also you are pointing people in the direction of the Google Guide, maybe should also drive them over to Matt Cutts recent video blogs see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMfWPWUh5uU questions about website design etc
Hey Brian – thanks
Look forward to the meet one day! 
Regarding matt’s blog…. or I could send them to Search Engine Optimisation TV lol… only kidding (for now) it’s a site on of the interns is making for testing purposes (and I had the domain so I thought I would bung something up
– Not told anybody about it yet… well until now. It’ll not be getting launched properly till he reads this post either lol….
When I started finding out about seo I was surprised and pleased at how much help and information is available for free on the web. It is shocking, that there are so many “proffesionals” who can’t or can’t be bothered to do the work to the level that they offer, just because their client doesn’t know any better.
IMO one of the worst comes under your point 3, linking to the homepage as index.py or whatever the directoryIndex is and also index.php?page=home.
Another one I have came across this fortnight is a company who has had their old site redirected to a new site using HTTp header code 302. That has got to be one of the most detrimental when it comes to SERPs.
@ David – Can you believe the same company I highlight:
• Forces the browser to index.asp
• has not sorted the DNS so that you cannot even ACCESS the site using non-www….. wow!
Shropshire must be one of the worst places for web design and SEO. One company has squashed a 5000px image down to 200px and other have made sites with no title tags, content loaded by AJAX to replace loreum ipsum and no index-able sub-pages.
LOL – although sometimes I find my self squashing images on this site…. lazy lazy!
Another issue to consider with duplicate title tags is the problem with pagination — both in product listings and comments on blogs. If a merchant has 5 pages of “yellow widgets”, each of the five pages will have the same title tag and this is a problem which developers are only starting to address. I believe there are plug-ins to address this when it comes to pages of comments on blogs. It is tedious work to give each page a unique and keyword researched title tag but it is worth it. Here is a great article by Ann Smarty on the topic:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagination-and-duplicate-content-issues/7204/
Ann fast become a favourite blogger of mine a long time ago
Shaun,
You mention having unique descriptions for every page.
What’s your view on blog posts? I don’t think you have a description on this post for example.
The view I read that made a lot of sense for me was from Joost de Valk who suggested not allowing SEO plugins like All In One SEO Pack to auto generate descriptions because google was more likely to find a relevant section on the page to display in the SERPs that you’d get by snagging the first few lines of the blog post.
Ian
For the purposes of these blog posts, sometimes I use meta descriptions, sometimes I don’t. I never autogenerate descriptions or keywords – for any site.
My rule of thumb is if I can’t be bothered creating a unique element like a meta description, I don’t autogenerate them. Like this post, I just leave it out.
I have long thought that if a company is marketing itself as ‘web design company’ then it should be producing PSD layouts (or equivalent) for passing onto the developers, and thats it.
If they wish to add HTML/CSS skills to their offerings, then they are going to have to learn how that is done properly, or not do it.
The real problem in our industry is the lack of descriptors to separate the different skillsets.
But… if sites were always done properly, half my clientele would dry up
Can you imagine if these people built cars? “We’ve heard about ABS, but figure we don’t need it to sell cars”. “Customers will never notice that our fuel economy is awful – they don’t know about that technical stuff”. “They’ll still buy them – we have great salesmen!”
Sad.