Down the Great SEO Rabbit Hole

Search Engine Optimization

The very term has become a buzzword in Website Design as every Expert says one of the following collection of phrases

• Your Website needs it
• Your Website doesn't need it
• Some aspects rank higher than others when applying SEO
• Doing SEO is a waste of time as it's useless

and the list of opinions go on as Web Designers pound our heads against the keyboards of our Design Rigs looking for that magical answer of just how to land up on page 1 of Google's results.

This exercise is one I've first hand been going through with the inertialzendesigns.com website. Hours upon hours being spent making minute adjustments in the code that powers the back end of the Site. Adjustments like 

• Making sure every image file was properly Tagged
• Using Keywords in the Site's Meta Tags description data
• Optimizing images, code and copy for speed while balancing image quality
• ensuring that the Website is Mobile Friendly and coded with Responsive Design
• Staying to W3C coding standards where ever possible within the limits of any code being entered for plugins.  

Everything above is in fact elements of good responsible design, and yet still the Website does not return a perfect score when tested for SEO. 

So, what is a Web Designer to do in a situation like this, you might ask. The answer is you do what any good company does, research your competition and see what is working for them.

The elements for this research were quite simple, and as follows

Search Google for a list of Web Designers in My local Community

Armed with this knowledge pull up the following two Websites

      seositecheckup.com to check the score for each site

      smallseotools.com to check backlinks and Site Age

Using these tools and a spreadsheet program chart the results.

With My Company's Website, and the competition list in hand, the results of this exercise becomes very telling, as you can see by the image of the spreadsheet below (Results that if you have the desire to replicate, you can using the sites listed above)

The competition for the purpose of this research is listed in order of Google's returned listing, below the listing for inertialzendesigns.com . Besides each site is their score on SEO site checkup based on the 45 Metric Test each site faced. Also listed is the age of the Website and where available the number of Sites pointing towards any given site.

So what exactly did I end up learning from this little experiment?   

• Website Age appears to have been weighed high in the ranking, even if a site's SEO Checkup Test scored lower than My Company's site
• Backlinks, while important, are not everything when it comes to SEO
• Good Coding Practices that meet W3C Standards will allow your Website to have a fair User Interface when it comes to ease of use, and following the standards will not really harm your ranking in SEO, on the other hand the jury is still out if it actually helps

It should also be pointed out that not all "suggested" metrics of SEO are a win-win, take for example the suggestion that CSS should be put minified to "speed up" the website.  

Minifying one's CSS code is the practice of shortening hex codes and removing white space from the document prior to uploading. In the case of inertial Zen Designs' Website code doing this actually knocked the elements of Mobile Friendliness and Responsive Design offline, which in turn caused the Mobile Browsers to render the Desktop version and Google's Web Developer Tools interface docking points due to the site not being Responsive.

So, just what is the answer to the question of how to handle SEO for a website? That is going to be a ongoing debate for some time to be honest. However, as a Web Designer how can one handle this aspect of Website Design?

In My opinion. Code for creating a user accessible experience, keep your client's message consistent across all platforms, make sure the project is well tested on multiple platforms while meeting the standards of good coding and advise your client that if they want to rank high on Google that time, patience and getting their site into the public's view space are going to play major factors.

If you have any questions about this posting, please leave comments and I will do My best to answer them

-David for inertialzendesigns.com