Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Specialists

Posts Tagged ‘SEO Consult Australia’

Where SEO and design don’t meet

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Website design is a skill. Although there are some gifted self-taught designers out there, many people in the web design industry have spent years gathering qualifications in order to provide their clients with the best site possible. The industry has its disreputable types, like any other, but mostly you can be sure that a web designer will do a good job on how your site looks.

What you can’t be sure of is whether the web design will help your site in being picked up by the search engines.

This is the cause of a fair amount of friction between the web design and SEO industries. Web designers, who have highly developed technical skills, often either assume that their site designs will be perfect for the web as is, or, when they do apply some optimization in the design stage, overestimate their SEO skills. SEO professionals get grumpy at this, because they have to straighten out the mess left behind.

Design is often treated as a separate issue from optimization, and this is a natural mistake to make. SEO is, after all, a branch of marketing. However, SEO is so affected by a site’s design that it can be well worthwhile accessing the services of an optimization consultant right from the beginning of the design process. You can talk to our consultants about design and SEO at SEO Consult Australia.

How design gets in the way of SEO

There are a few areas where web design and search engine optimisation will clash on your site, if you have accessed these services in isolation. The first one is the structure of the site. Web designers usually work to a visual aesthetic, creating a site that is pleasing to the eye. They will take your business requirements on board, but the way in which pages flow into each other will usually be designed to be visually impressive.

This gets in the way of optimization more often than not. Search engine optimization is based on the way humans relate words. The search engines base their algorithms on this. If your pages are linked together in a logical sequence of relevance, it’s more likely that the search engines will rank your pages higher.

Another way in which web design often gets in the way of optimization is layout. Designers like room. They like pictures. They like graphics. Search engines, however, like text. As time goes by, sites need more and more text in order to compete for the best spots for their keywords. This means that some of the more ‘clean page’ design principles have to be thrown out the window.

Don’t cling to design principles

When it comes down to it, having pretty pages is not going to get your site very far. Appearance is important when it comes to online success, this is true, but when the time comes for your site to be optimized, it’s important to listen to your consultants. It’s usually better to sacrifice some design elements in order to have a search-competitive site.

Using Google Places

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

SEO shouldn’t be the beginning and end of an online campaign for any business. In order to succeed online, it’s important to use several strands of online marketing to develop your web presence. Often, you will find that the various strands of your online campaign complement each other, such as using PPC to support the early stages of a search engine optimisation campaign. Another way to support your SEO is to take a look at Google Places.

Google Places is the next step in Google’s campaign to enrich local search results. Google first edged toward local results a few years ago, and the more refined results of Google Local have made things interesting for businesses with any local angle. The updated scheme ties the commercial side of Google more firmly to the search engine’s local search angle.

What exactly is Google Places?

Most internet users should have noticed local results appearing with increasing frequency over the last year or three. These results appear in a special section for certain searches, often appearing as a list of business names next to a Google map. Often, the results appear on a Google Maps search as well. Google Places will show listings in much the same way, with one significant change.

Google Places is simply a rebranding of Google Local Business Centre, but the change in name is a sign of the significant changes Google has made to the way it deals with local search and business. Whereas before the search engine’s local business search was geared mainly toward user control, Google Places is definitely built for businesses to use. The main way in which this is reflected is in the ability for businesses to place sponsored listings.

Any business that has dealt with Google should be familiar with the way sponsored listings work. If you’re designing an online campaign, you’ve possibly looked into Google AdWords to help boost your traffic. With AdWords, competition was usually quite high because every business was competing on a grand scale. With sponsored listings on Google Places, the playing field is much smaller, and the listing is directly attached to your business listing in the local results. Basically, paid listings are just a way to enhance your regular results.

Google Places is the next step in the evolution of Google Local

The sponsored listings add an interesting element to Google’s local results. Any smart business should be looking at potential local angles as a part of its search engine optimisation campaign, as local listings can give a business a very competitive edge. Talk to our consultants at SEO Consult Australia about this. Although this area of Google is mainly aimed at the small business owner, larger businesses have taken advantage of the highly-specific target groups that local search exposes.

The slight change with Google Places makes the game even more interesting. Google is saying that a sponsored listing can get you a photo, a video, directions or a special message for customers – but only one of these. This means that local listings will be even more of a game of strategy than before.

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