Web Design Melbourne
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The recent fiasco with JCPenney dodgy Google ranking practices has illustrated for me once again how web designers often ignore the importance of SEO in the design process.Don’t get me wrong I have a lot of friends who are web designers but SEO for a long time was considered something beneath them. Something impure. The reality was they didn’t really understand SEO. Oh sure, they understood the mechanics around it but they didn’t understand how important it was to their client’s business. Ask yourself; why do you have a website? If you are a business owner it’s either because you want it to help you make money or save you money. It does not get any more basic than that.Web designers, for the most part don’t understand how things like keyword analysis and good content structure affect the bottom line of a business. We do.
Web design & SEO
At least half of our clients SEO campaigns begin by us rebuilding their site. That’s because even though the sites may look great and function well for the user, they either can’t be optimised because of the proprietary content management system or they are a big ball of noise to the Googlebot. In one recent case, a web design firm (who will remain nameless) did not realise their client’s site had 45,000 pages in the Google index, when there were only about 25,000 real pages on the site. The web site was confusing Google as it had duplicate pages that the bot kept on finding. The client decided to take the advice of their web designer rather than us and every week since then, Google has been picking up thousands of more duplicate pages to the point where they now have 600,000 pages in the index of which only about 30,000 are real. That is a big ball of noise to Google.
Social Media & SEO
I love social media. The primary outlets I use are Twitter, YouTube & Facebook in that order. We also produce Facebook pages for business as well as YouTube channels and help them with their Twitter presence. However most of the local social media outsourcing I see is campaign based, which is fine but to me that is not really a long term strategy. Everything starts with Google. It’s not just me saying that. Have a look at the Edelmann Trust Barometer or listen to David Meerman Scott. So social media campaigns can certainly drive sales for that campaign but search marketing is the marketing that keeps on giving. It is the foundation of your online marketing.
We’re Web Designers
By default over the years we have become web designers. We’ve built a team of developers, designers & writers. I’ve lost count of how many websites we’ve built or rebuilt. So if you want a web site that will rank in Google we’d love to help you. Our main focus though is to drive targeted relevant traffic to your door initially from the search engines. If you want to get traffic another way then we are not the web designer for you.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
