We are frequently requested to review websites for search engine accessibility and optimisation best practice, only to find fundamental implementation flaws inherent in the website by web design companies. I’d like to be able to blame the agencies, but mostly these issues are more about a lack of knowledge or experience in the agency, as they are rarely full service. It’s a bitter pill for business owners to swallow in facing up to the large investment they have just made and the reality that this investment needs to increase to re-work the site to maximise the opportunity for search engine optimisation.
We believe that every website designer and website developer should understand the bare bones principles of search engine optimisation and how it relates to good user experience, information architecture and technical architecture. Both disciplines carry the need to understand this, as a failure at these early stages in the lifecycle of a website can be very costly to unravel along with running the risk of compromising the relationship with the client. An agency that doesn’t have any SEO capability, should consider partnering with an organisation (such as Cenetrix) to ensure that the solution proposed is search engine friendly.
A typical web design implementation should include information architecture, technical architecture, user experience. These should minimise the risk of fundamental flaws to the technical implementation.
With the advent of web 2.0 and laterally more dynamic websites, developers have occasionally taken it upon themselves to increase complexity without any business gain. This is not a new phenomenon as it has not changed in the software engineering profession for the 20 years I’ve worked with technology. It does however need to be challenged by customers and they need to be empowered to ask the smart questions.
Customers engaging a website design agency should ask some smart questions to protect their investment, such as:
- After the site goes live, will all my pages appear on google?
- Do you implement a solution that search engines can crawl?
- Where will my site be hosted, in which country?
- Does a visitor see the same web page if they enter the site from a search engine results page and also navigating to it from within the site?
- Have you ever migrated a website or relaunched one before and how did you deal with continuity of search engine placement?
- Can we engage with an SEO company during the design and development phases?
These short questions could save you a lot of re-investment and makes an SEO strategy more about content for your customers, keywords and building the relevancy and authority of your site rather than changing the technology used in the implementation.
The challenge in this industry is that there are lots of people that develop websites, the barriers to entry are low and some times the quality suffers as a result. As a business looking for a website development partner you must ask yourself whether the outfit you choose understands user experience, information architecture, technical architecture and SEO along with it’s implication on a website.
Cenetrix are a full service digital agency. We also partner with other businesses to provide a range of services for clients of all sizes.
In all our engagements we include a brief introduction to SEO, we find it works well as most businesses either don’t know, or did know but were afraid to ask. It is our belief that basic best practice should be built into all websites.
