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This is part 3 of a 3 post series meant to help you identify some areas to focus on when choosing a web designer who also understands SEO. Keeping these ideas in mind during the building process may help you to get the most out of your designer’s “on-the-clock” hours.

Aesthetic appeal is subjective, but the objectives of your website should be a fully conscious, coordinated effort. If you build with search in mind, it will be much easier to get qualified traffic in effective queries rather than trying to retrofit a built and indexed website with an SEO campaign. Obviously the ladder is still very plausible but in terms of business, may cost you more dollars than sense.

The following are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a designer for a new website. (Note: For the purpose of this discussion we’ll assume that content is not up to the designer.)

Choose a web designer who understands the crawl.

Work with your designer to ensure that all portions of your website will support proper web crawling and indexing.

Spiders, also called bots, are automated scripts in charge of crawling the interweb for information gathering, and other stuff. In regards to search engines, if a spider hasn’t touched your page, it won’t be indexed or served to search users.

Although being crawled by a search engine doesn’t give you an automatic jump to the indexed bin, building a spider accessible, fully indexable website that stimulates frequent crawling to deep rooted pages will go a long way to maximizing your web presence. Like all things search, keeping the crawl in mind during the building process will make your life much easier when you choose to expand.

Redundant Accessibility

Build out new sections with redundant accessibility by linking to each page from multiple pages within the same site. Shoot for at least 2 to 3 ways to access a single page. It’s really not as daunting as it sounds. If you build an HTML/XHTML sitemap for your user, that’s 1. Build parent pages for each individual item or concept, that’s 2. Provide navigational aids, such as breadcrumbs, that provide a link back to each previous section, boom you’re done! Be creative and ONLY ADD LINKS IF IT AIDS THE USER.

JavaScript Navigation

There are always new methods to MacGyver the ability to crawl navigation but to truly put an emphasis on search stick with XHTML/CSS. Hey, you can do a lot with CSS and XHTML!

If you’re not sure if that glitzy navigation allows the spider to pass from section to section then test it with an all text browser. If you can’t navigate your site, neither can the spider.

Stimulate the Deep Crawl

If deploying a larger website, 100+ pages, it may take several visits for spiders to fully index your pages. Anything that you or your designer can do to increase the rate of crawl is a good thing. Placing dynamic, engaging, natural link-worthy content on hub pages will be ideal points of entry for spiders. Channeling spiders like blood flow to deep rooted pages may help keep leaf pages from being isolated or dropping out of the index.

Plug Yourself

When deploying new sections or content remind users, and spiders, with links to existing sections. You’ll want to plug your hub pages because you will have already designed these sections to keep those bots barreling through page after well linked page of your website.

Use the robots.txt

Make sure your designer understands the power of the robots.txt. You can use it to tell the spider to auto-discover your sitemap.xml, ignore certain sections, or strait tell it to go away while you perform maintenance or finish building.

There are really too many options to list. In not so many words it is one of the only opportunities you’ll get to guide the spider with explicit directions of how it should treat your website.

I hope after reading this little 3 post series that it will be easier to choose a web designer that also understands SEO. I tried to approach this topic by identifying what I would look for if I were to outsource a website. Thanks for reading!

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Quick Reference:

How to choose a web designer that also understands SEO

Part 1: Choose a web designer that understands how to build for the search user.
Part 2: Choose a web designer that understands usability.
Part 3: Choose a web designer who understands the crawl.

People actually search for “natural link building” advice and techniques. A critical mind will ask what distinguishes “natural link building” from presumably “unnatural link building” or “artificial link building”. There is no unnatural way to build links. There is no artificial way to build links.

Link building is the practice of obtaining links from other sites. It’s all natural, 100% of the time.

It may be that people who search for “natural link building” are more interested in so-called white hat link building or best practices link building.

Or perhaps people who want to know more about “natural link building” are looking for information on how to acquire links without actually building them. A better expression to describe this process would be “link accretion”, “link growth”, or “link acquisition”.

Natural link growth occurs when other people link to your site without any incentive or directive from you (hence, link baiting does not contribute to natural link growth). You attract links naturally because you’re a resource, because you’re popular, or because you’re doing something unusual enough to intrigue people whom you had no idea existed.

Let’s say I write on my personal blog about wanting to buy a new mattress. This is a confusing topic for most people because the mattress industry is highly competitive and uses every legal means available to establish uniqueness for its products. I could point out in my blog post that I went searching for advice online and found the mattress blog. It seems like you can find a blog about almost any topic these days (although I was challenged to find a real blog about the care of felt hats two years ago and did not produce satisfactory results).

I could, actually, point to a felt hat blog today, but I digress….

These are natural links. No one asked me for them. No one suggested what I link to. No one requested specific anchor text. I provided them on my own, of my own free will. To the best of my knowledge, I have no connection with either of these bloggers (both of whom seem to be business people using blogs to promote their businesses…hm…).

You don’t build natural links. They just come out of nowhere, randomly, without any real agenda or strategy behind them. Some sites obtain a lot of natural links, either because they are highly visible, or because they are extremely useful, or both.

I did actually spend time reading the mattress blog when I had some questions about mattress quality recently. I only just grabbed the felting blog link because it looked like the first dedicated felt blog in the list of search results. I can be lazy, too. That’s natural.

There are different types of links and most Web sites could use a few of each type. A robust link building program includes as many types of links as are sensible and economically obtainable. The majority of Web sites don’t need more than a 2-3 month link-building program. If you’re still building links after three months, you’re doing something wrong.

We can assess links in many ways, but for search engine optimization you want to divide links into brand-building links, visibility-building links, relationship-building links, and crawl-building links.

A brand-building link associates value with the brand of the destination. For example, we can link to example.com as an example, establishing a brand value for that site as an example destination. Other examples of brand-building links include linking to CNN, ABC News, BBC News, FoxNews, and similar sites as news sites. Brand-building links may be based upon keyword research but they should not all be keyword-annotative links. Brand value can be built through descriptive association as well as through explicit association.

Directory links are the most common form of brand-building links used by the SEO industry. (Note: In this context, a directory is any ordered list of Web sites of a similar nature — it does not have to part of a traditional Web directory like Yahoo! or DMOZ.)

A visibility-building link is prominently positioned in a high-traffic article or body copy. The featured stories on news sites and entertainment sites are visibility-building links. People may not click on them, and search engines may not find them, but they create visibility for content — and that visibility may be lasting, producing secondary traffic when people recall the featured stories later and go searching for them. Visibility links can only be placed on high traffic pages. Or, to look at it another way, you’re not creating much visibility by placing a link on a low-traffic page.

Pay-per-click links are the most common form of visibility-building links used by the SEO industry.

Relationship-building links are the links that members, partners, customers, and vendors give to each other. If you’re a member of a professional association and they list your Web site in their directory, that’s a relationship-building link. It implies to a visitor that there is a relationship between you and the association. The relationship is between entities, not between Web sites (except in a few circumstances, such as when the Web sites are the primary function of corporate entities, like eBay and Amazon, Alexa, A9, Google and YouTube, etc.).

When you’re browsing a travel site and you see links at the bottom of the page pointing to car rental, hotel accommodation, and similar sites representing companies that are owned by or similarly affiliated with the site operator, you’re looking at relationship links. When you’re browsing a SpamAd site and you see footer links pointing to other SpamAd sites, you’re NOT looking at relationship links. The relationship is between the entities, not between the sites.

Crawl-building links may be found anywhere. A crawl-building link may be a hybrid (built for brand-and-crawl, visibility-and-crawl, or for relationship-and-crawl) or it may be pure (built solely for crawl). Crawl-building links tend to be the most controversial because they are often misused for anchor text. SEOs tend to build more crawl-building links than all other types of links combined.

Crawl-building links should be used first and foremost for the sake of getting sites crawled, indexed, and into competitive ranking range.

Using these type models, your link building program can be easily designed and quickly implemented. The program needs to leverage all available assets. Some SEOs have more assets to work with than others.

Step 1: Place your brand-building links. How many you need really depends on where you place the links. Suppose your brand is “Honest Mike’s Used Car Business”. That’s a fairly competitive industry, so to build brand value you’ll either have to obtain more links or you need to refine your brand. Let’s say Honest Mike’s car lot is located in Smalltown, USA. You don’t really need to create a national brand, then, do you? The real brand is “Honest Mike’s (Smalltown, USA) Used Car Business”. That’s a much less competitive field and it defines where you need your brand links:

• Local search
• Local business directories
• Telephone directories
• Local business communities

In short, any resource that provides brand value for businesses in the Smalltown, USA market is where you want to obtain brand-building links. How many do you need? As few as possible. Think of your link building program as planting a seed. As people recognize the value of your brand, they’ll provide more links for you. Natural link growth is NOT part of a link building program.

Step 2: Place your visibility-building links. How many you need really depends on whether you’re insane or just interested in getting the word out. One good local blog should be able to send your site tons of traffic. One decent local news story should be able to send you lots of traffic. One decent classified ad might be all you need. Again, your link building program just needs to get the process started. Your visibility links should bring you traffic. If all the high visibility sources in your specific market provide you with visibility links, you’re done. There are usually not that many high visibility sources for specific markets. I’ve rarely found more than 10 such sources for any market (and it’s hard to find that many for most).

Step 3: Get your relationship-building links. Some people might do this first. I often do when I create a new site in my network. When you control the sites you’re dealing with low-hanging fruit. But when you’re dealing with a multitude of companies, partners, vendors, etc., you will find it takes longer to get these types of links. It’s usually just a matter of going through a process, but these links can be left for the third step for a strategic purpose.

If you have placed your brand-building links, then obtain visibility links, people will find your brand links and be reassured that you’re a real entity. Brand-building links and visibility links give you credibility with your early audience. If you can get the partner links quickly, then do it, but don’t expect a lot of traffic or visibility from such links.

Step 4: Get your crawl-building links. While it’s true that the other types of links might influence your crawl, you have better control over what gets crawled when you place links specifically designed to influence crawl. Crawl-building links should point to deeper content within your site. Your brand, visibility, and partner links will almost always point to your root URL. Use your crawl-building links to get the rest of your site crawled.

And here is the million-dollar question: Where do you get your crawl links? Get them from sites that can help you in some way other than just with crawl. That is, hybrid crawl links are just fine as long as you obtain them for truly strategic purposes. Anchor text is not strategic. Visibility IS strategic. So if you can enhance your visibility and improve your crawl, you’re doing fine.

For hybrid links, it’s okay to build visibility on secondary sites that have less traffic than your primary visibility sites. These sites supplement and complement your link profile.

The most important part of your link plan consists of the goals you set. You should assign specific numbers to the types of links you obtain. Once you’ve reached your self-appointed limit, move on.

But you’ll also need to assess the quality of your linking resources carefully. Be sure these sites get traffic, are well-indexed, and have at least some search engine trust. Watch your statistics and track referrals. Check the cache data for the other sites to determine when your links appear. If you find that some of your links haven’t been cached within 3 months, you should see if you can find some alternative links. It’s not easy to find alternative brand and partner links, but there may be alternative visibility link sources. In fact, if a visibility link source isn’t cached within 3 months, it’s probably not a high traffic resource after all.

This is part 2 of a 3 post series meant to help you identify some areas to focus on when choosing a web designer who also understands SEO. Keeping these ideas in mind during the building process may help you to get the most out of your designer’s “on-the-clock” hours.

Aesthetic appeal is subjective, but the objectives of your website should be a fully conscious, coordinated effort. If you build with search in mind, it will be much easier to get qualified traffic in effective queries rather than trying to retrofit a built and indexed website with an SEO campaign. Obviously the ladder is still very plausible but in terms of business, may cost you more dollars than sense.

The following are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a designer for a new website. (Note: For the purpose of this discussion we’ll assume that content is not up to the designer.)

Choose a web designer that understands usability.

Collaborate to design effective pages with your user in mind. What will they see? Where will they go? What are they supposed to do now that they’ve found your website? What do they need to know in order to convert? Show them where to go with legible fonts and graphics that make sense.

Navigation

Don’t omit tabs on your main navigation from section to section. On the conception stage, make sure your designer integrates navigational pillars that do not change. Static navigation to hub sections reassures the visitor that by clicking around they will always be able to find their way back to a main section. Never strand them in cyberspace by walking them through a series of links that follow no back logic.

Lay breadcrumbs, use static hub sections, provide an icon with a home link, something to stop them from wandering into the void while encouraging them to explore. If you don’t instantly know where to go when you see the mockup, then chances are nobody else will either. A good rule of thumb is to try to make all pages of your site accessible without having to resort to the browser’s navigation.

K.I.S.S.

Clean coding and strait forward presentation are always a best bet. Revolutionary effects in bleeding edge technologies are sexy, but simple carts and predictable navigation convert. Statistics reveal that bounce rate greatly increases when new users are paired with flamboyant and over-excitable layouts. Avoid distracting users with what is not relevant. Keep them focused and clear the path to a conversion.

Clean Coding

It may not be necessary to code to W3C’s evolving standards but remember that bad code breeds. Sloppy code is often replicated in hidden areas and may remain hidden until integral components of your site are shifted around. Launching your holiday product line is not the time to discover that your shopping cart doesn’t integrate into your new product pages.

Avoid Application Dependency

Designers that rely too heavily on web building programs can box in your options for expansion as your website matures. It is important to discuss the architecture options of your website with your designer prior to implementation. A 20 page website is vastly different architecturally than a 20k page website.

Site building programs often clutter the code with extraneous injections and specialized tags. Seek designers that have a proven track record of integrating their work into a production environment. Such environments often test the adaptability, resourcefulness and troubleshooting of a designer’s skill set.

Plan for Transition

If your intention is to build out the content over time, make sure that you have a plan to transition the tools and working files to the next designer. Agree on a set of core technologies to be used and ensure that they are consistent with current standards and the projected half-life of your website.

And of course, the best evaluation of potential designer is to ask for samples and run them by someone with a few years experience to look under the hood.

___________________________________________________________________

Quick Reference:

How to choose a web designer that also understands SEO

Part 1: Choose a web designer that understands how to build for the search user.
Part 2: Choose a web designer that understands usability.
Part 3: Choose a web designer who understands the crawl.