How do I assess the SEO capabilities of a web designer

[Julian]

I need a web site to go live in about 6 months time so at some point between now and then I will be engaging a web design company to build my site. My site will be a CMS site but not eCommerce (no online store).

I can get some idea of the stylistic capabilities of a designer by looking at their portfolio and many of them talk about the standards compliance testing that they do on their code but how do I judge their SEO capabilies?

I'm not bothered about creating loads of back links to my site because that can be done after the site is built (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here), what I'm more bothered about is making sure that the site itself is being built with due consideration to being SEO friendly.

I suppose that I can visit some of the sites in a designer's portfolio, look at what that client does and then google using representative search terms and see how it ranks. My problem here is that it seems fairly clear to me that if the site ranks highly then that is a tick in the SEO box but if a site doesn't rank highly then does this necessarily mean that the site itself is not SEO friendly? Also, the search terms that I use will be so variable unless I can find sites in the same industry in every designer's portfolio, that it becomes a very unscientific test. In short I'm concerned as to whether this strategy would yield any really meaningful results. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.

So, if the above isn't a good or sufficient way of assessing SEO quality then what questions could I ask a web designer, or are there any things I can easily look for in the page source of portfolio sites, that would help me make some judgements regarding the designer's capability to create an SEO friendly site?

- Julian

[OldWelshGuy]

Are you asking about the ability of the designer to SEo your site, or to build you an SEO friendly ite? They are poles apart.

[Julian]

Are you asking about the ability of the designer to SEo your site, or to build you an SEO friendly ite? They are poles apart.
The ability of the designer to build me an SEO-friendly site.

- Julian

[OldWelshGuy]

If youa re talking about the actual CMS, then

Title Tag Customization - you MUSt be able to create a unique title tage for each page.

Meta Tag Customization - you must be able to create unique descriptions and keywords for each page (although the KW meta is largely ignored)

Enabling Custom HTML Tags - ideally you should be able to add no follow etc easily to links

Image-Handling & Alt Tags - Ideally alt attributes should be an option for all images

Internal Anchor Text - you should be able to add the link anchor text independently of the category title etc.

Static URLs you should be able to have static urls, AND you should be able to define them and not have them autogenerated.

Complete control over headers and footers is another ideal option.

If your CMS has the above, then it is fairly SEO friendly. You just need to know what you are doing, as amonkey driving an F1 car is not going to win races :D

[Kev Jaques]

you could try this as a very simple and quick seo score check you could run it against http://whois.domaintools.com/yoururltocheck

This is just to get a quick idea of a site or page, also open up the seo text browser on the right hand side and click the i icon to see a bit more about the page.

This is just one tool amongst many in a sea of seo tools, but its a reasonably good guide to get a gist of an overall score, you will want to look at other things too, this only just touches the surface.

I can see your wanting to explore so your better equipped to know what you want, however, don't get bogged down with it all unless you really want to know the ins and outs of everything as its a long road.

Again there are countless tools, techniques out there, you could spend your 6 months looking at them.

[QVA - Emma]

Hi Julian,

It is nice to see that you are considering how you are going to go about hiring a designer to build your website, and one that is fairly competent in SEO.

There are some designers out there that don't know where to start and the trick is knowing who to stay away from and what to ask.

Google has a great guide which will answer many of your questions about hiring an SEO - you can hire a designer and SEO to work together to optimise your site - alternatively you can consult an SEO prior to hiring your designer and be armed with all they need to know, bascially laying it on a plate and instructing them.

First and foremost hire someone you can work with, someone who will explain the whole process and take you through each phase of what they intend to do. I would be highly sceptical if you were asked what keywords you want your site to be optimised for because these should be researched thoroughly by your designer, then discussions can take place about relevancy to your market etc.

Backlinks are normally built once the site is live as part of an ongoing process, SEO is ongoing and unfortunately once your site is live it will need to be continually monitored to ensure it reaches and stays at key positions. Market trends also change so some keywords may become redundant or change dramatically.

You are planning well in advance so if you have ideas it may be worth your while purchasing your domain now.

Do a little research into SEO so you have a basic understanding and can tackle any issues that you have in your quest to hire.

The link to the google advice is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

All the best:)

[QVA - Emma]

If youa re talking about the actual CMS, then

Title Tag Customization - you MUSt be able to create a unique title tage for each page.

Meta Tag Customization - you must be able to create unique descriptions and keywords for each page (although the KW meta is largely ignored)

Enabling Custom HTML Tags - ideally you should be able to add no follow etc easily to links

Image-Handling & Alt Tags - Ideally alt attributes should be an option for all images

Internal Anchor Text - you should be able to add the link anchor text independently of the category title etc.

Static URLs you should be able to have static urls, AND you should be able to define them and not have them autogenerated.

Complete control over headers and footers is another ideal option.

If your CMS has the above, then it is fairly SEO friendly. You just need to know what you are doing, as amonkey driving an F1 car is not going to win races :D

Or alternatively just follow all of the above!! :D (my typing must be slowing down!)

[alltimemedia]

Hello
As web designers we optimize every site we build so that search engines like the site, we would include things like OldWelshGuy mentioned, we also provide advice on how a client can get higher search engine ranking with the more long term tasks.

You could ask the company about previous websites they have been involved in and do your own checks on those sites. There are many tools that will perform a free seo check.

Allot of the marketing will be done afterword's and keyword research would need to be done, but the site would need to be built with the intention of gaining organic traffic from search engines, after all, this traffic is free.

If a site is not optimized properly it could be sand boxed by google, minor errors could lower ranking.

[Julian]

Thanks guys.

Kev - I don't want to get bogged down in this at all, that's why I plan to hire someone. I just want to at least have a few questions to ask so that I have some chance of avoiding a complete cowboy (or cowgirl) web designer who ends up creating a completely SEO-unfriendly site.

OldWelshGuy - Thanks for the advise on the CMS. Am I safe in assuming that all the "big name" CMS-es are fairly SEO friendly (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, etc)? As your F1 analogy says quite nicely though, the CMS is necessary but not sufficient; the web designer I choose needs to know how to use it well with respect to creating an SEO-friendly site. Your list of items might be a pretty good starting point for a list of questions to try and find out whether my web designer is a monkey or an F1 driver, that is the real issue that I'm trying to address.

- Julian

[Eagle]

I'd personally get a trusted independent SEO expert to check what sites they're building are competent. :)

[sirearl]

Thanks guys.

Kev - I don't want to get bogged down in this at all, that's why I plan to hire someone. I just want to at least have a few questions to ask



- Julian

Ask them to show you some of the sites they have got to the top of google,and assess the difficulty of the key words

Simple really init.:|


Earl

[Maslins]

http://whois.domaintools.com/yoururltocheck thanks for that. V useful. Also shows me what meta tags my designed used, not sure they're the ones I would've chosen but at least I can see the guy tried :)

I got an SEO score of 84% which sounds surprisingly good. However, I've got a title relevancy of 62% and description relevancy of 43% :(

I'm slightly concerned as to what these are relevant to (ie I didn't stipulate the keywords I wanted to be SEO'd for).

Could this just be caused because the meta tags don't particularly agree with the rest of the content?

What would be considered a good score?!

[fisicx]

And while ranking is important it's not as important as building a user-friendly site that actual converts. No point in being at #1 if nobody buys anything.

So you need a designer that can build a site that is usable, accessible, optimised, maintainable, validates and works on all browser types and mobile devices.

[fisicx]

http://whois.domaintools.com/yoururltocheck thanks for that. V useful. Also shows me what meta tags my designed used, not sure they're the ones I would've chosen but at least I can see the guy tried :)

I got an SEO score of 84% which sounds surprisingly good. However, I've got a title relevancy of 62% and description relevancy of 43% :(

I'm slightly concerned as to what these are relevant to (ie I didn't stipulate the keywords I wanted to be SEO'd for).

Meta tags don't matter for ranking. The only one you need is the meta description and that's only to help clickthroughs from the SE. Page titles are vital if tyou want to improve your ranking. If you can't changes these then you need a new CMS as getting your titles right may takes weeks of tweaking.

[Codefixer]

What sites they have worked on, the budget, timescales, sectors they have worked in, what they have achieved, the methods they use and most importantly what they can offer you.

[OldWelshGuy]

OldWelshGuy - Thanks for the advise on the CMS. Am I safe in assuming that all the "big name" CMS-es are fairly SEO friendly (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, etc)? As your F1 analogy says quite nicely though, the CMS is necessary but not sufficient; the web designer I choose needs to know how to use it well with respect to creating an SEO-friendly site. Your list of items might be a pretty good starting point for a list of questions to try and find out whether my web designer is a monkey or an F1 driver, that is the real issue that I'm trying to address.

- Julian

Both Joomla & WP need to be modded to make them properly SEF, Drupal is very good. This is the problem though, in that it is easy for the designer to mess things up for you. WP & to an extent joomla, will serve the same content from different URL's for example, and this needs to be addresses immediately as part of the SEF efforts.

Google state you should get an SEO in as early as possible, (as has been said here), this will ensure that the site is SEo'ed from the ground up.

[rossi4673]

We offer free, impartial and substantiated advice via my homepage. Please take time to view. Thanks. Chris

[Tin]

you could try this as a very simple and quick seo score check you could run it against http://whois.domaintools.com/yoururltocheck

Sorry, but this is not in any way reliable for checking the seo performance of a site. I've a number of private domains that are used solely for email transportation (no website on the domains, not even a single page) yet the tool will often report a seo score in the region of 90%.

Ray

[Kev Jaques]

Sorry, but this is not in any way reliable for checking the seo performance of a site. I've a number of private domains that are used solely for email transportation (no website on the domains, not even a single page) yet the tool will often report a seo score in the region of 90%.

Ray

If you had read my post Ray you would have seen it is just 1 tool amongst hundreds, no where did I say it was a definitive answer

There is no 1 tool to do all

[Kev Jaques]

Chris

Check your site h1 & h2 tags, those are important

[Tin]

Sorry Kev if I misread your post, I didn't think I stated you were saying it was a definitive tool, my point is that whilst it may be a tool amongst hundreds, it isn't worth taking notice of because of its wild misreporting.

Ray

[Kev Jaques]

Nps Ray :)
I mentioned it as it is good enough to get a quick look despite its shortcomings, there are other tools out there which can help but looking for these too is a daunting task, especially for people just looking to quickly ascertain a basic level of understanding.

It might be beneficial for good tools to be listed in a sticky thread and marked free or paid, so people coming to the site can check sites out prior to asking other questions, there are numerous people coming to this forum asking these basic questions.

Although this is a business forum, people are bringing technical aspects to this site and wanting answers, I mentioned some other technical aspects in another thread only to be shot down as I aired a view, the problem is people are coming here whether we like it or not and those questions are not being answered in full as people don't have the time or there are misunderstandings etc...

No tool is 100% correct anymore, I mentioned it as its one of the whoisdomain tools and use that domain as one of the identifying tools for other domains, anyone can use it.

I think the main problem on the net is that there is such an abundance of tools, information and lack of knowledge and lack of official bodies telling us what exactly is what.
SEO is spiraling out of control though and too much emphasis is spent on it from all manner of related things, so much so that it can consume you.

[Tin]

Hi Julian

Lots of good pointers above and if you want to put them on the spot...

You could start with asking them for some client results that demonstrate their work which'll obviously be in the form of ranking positions, keywords for those ranking positions and respective client url's. I'd expect them to work across different markets so you should be able to get a cross section of clients and start looking into the results they've obtained for the clients. This will give you some idea of how well they adapt to understanding the varying differences in keyword competition and how well they cope through various markets.

Don't automatically assume when you're verifying those keywords that a high number of results (1 to 10 of about XXXXXXXX) is indicative of true competition as it's not that straightforward, some serps (search engine results pages) can 'appear difficult' if you just look at the possible number of results but may in fact be quite easy to achieve whilst others, may seem easy but in reality can sometimes have high competition and 'depth' for what seems on the surface as simple.

I think what 'is' important is that the most appropriate keywords that are targeted are the ones that will deliver the most benefit to you the client without wasting any of the site's resources on non-performing keywords.

When you're doing your checks take a little time to look over the site concerned to get a good feel for what the site is about, this should put a few keywords/keyphrases into your mind then go and check the ranking based on those keywords and see how things look. Page 1 of Google is where the money is and the higher up the better.

Obviously beware of any guarantees, Google doesn't offer them up for grabs so how can an seo.

The best way of ensuring you get a good seo company is to ask for recommendations and speak directly with previous clients. Check the results yourself, don't just take others words for it.

Find out exactly what the seo is going to do for you and don't be put off by jargon or waffle, a good seo should be able to explain everything for you in layman's terms.

Running off some quick questions..............

1. Ask them what they do about page titles & descriptions. They should be unique and specific to each and every page in the site. Titles should also consist of two halves where possible, keyword/keyphrase focussed in the first half and "WiiFM" in the second half, "what's in it for me". In other words, your designers should be looking at providing a strong reason why the reader in Google's search results feels like clicking on your result rather than a competitors result and a WiiFM can often make the difference. Think of a WiiFM as a ' visitor benefit' for example if you sell a product and you know your prices are competitive then say so! They'll know a good price when they see one.

"Quality 'product keyword/keyphrase' from £XXX"

2. Ask them what they do about session url's (assuming they do eCommerce sites). Ideally, they need to dump the query string and turn it into something short and meaningful. If it's a non eCommerce site then the urls would help if they're relevant somewhat to the page content.

3. How do they get search engines to know about your site if they don't already. The normal and easiest way is from a link within a site that's already indexed or through using the Google Toolbar with advanced setting ticked. Mass submission to 1000,s of different engines has been the wrong way to do things for years.

4. Do they research keywords/phrases and how. There's some guesstimation in this regard but essentially, running a test bed PPC account which targets a keyword short list will provide decent data on ad impressions (users looking under those keywords) and is a very good guide to search volumes. Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker are two popular sources of information, expect very mixed results but some trends should emerge after staring at the numbers over a few cups of tea.

5. What do they do about external link building. Basically, you want 1 way, non reciprocal on topic (or as close to on topic as you can get) links from quality sources. Tons of junk links that are way off topic are a waste of time and resources. You'll also benefit from deep links so ask them about those and how they go about sourcing them.

6. Do they code spiderable internal navigation links into their sites. Internal links within a site count as well as external links so they must ensure that the search robots can find every page within the site from all links.

7. How do they treat new domains from more established ones. Established ones are much easier to seo and the results will kick in far faster. New domains very often can suffer from an ageing filter which doesn't affect older domains. The ageing can also be affected by the competitiveness of the targeted words.

Simple things you should also look for is to check whether they keyword stuff. This should be obvious to most people, needs no explanation. They should also know about correct use of Header tags, Alt tags, Body text etc. but that's another story.

No doubt I've missed loads but time for breakfast and someone else can chip in their bit.

Cheers

Ray

[PointandStare]

I think you're also confusing the role of a designer and a developer.
The designer would work on branding, UI, flow etc, the developer would be involved in structure, language etc.
Also SEO features should be taken into account at the outset, not as an after thought.

To judge whether a company is SEO competent firstly you need to check their current portfolio, check up on client testimonials and check the code/ structure of their own site.
Next thing to do is then check a few sites from their portfolio. Do they validate, do they flow well, is the structure working?

Then contact some of the companies in their portfolio to see what they say, how the project went and most important, would they use them again.

And lastly but probably most important, do you have a good feeling about the company yourself.
If not then it's time to move on.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have and let us know when the site goes live.

[Julian]

Thanks everyone for some really great help and advice. There's far too much here for me to specifically comment on everything individually; I have read and absorbed everything posted. There are just a couple of points I'd like to pick up on.

I think you're also confusing the role of a designer and a developer.
The designer would work on branding, UI, flow etc, the developer would be involved in structure, language etc.
No and yes. "No" in that I have a pretty good understanding of the difference between the two, but "yes" in that my choice of thread title and my subsequent posts used sloppy terminology and would absolutely give the impression that I was confused. It's an interesting point though.

The source of the confusion in my postings is that I realise that both skills are involved but will, like 99% of the people here I think, be going to a single point of contact to get both the skills. Since I haven't chosen my "supplier" yet I can't tell yet whether that will be a single multi-talented individual or whether it will be an "outfit" where there are a mix of people with a mix of skills. I shied away from using the term "design agency" because I was concerned that this might make it look as if I was doing things on a bigger scale than I am but, if I take care to qualify the term by saying that a "web design agency" could be a one person operation or a small group of people with complementary skills trading under a unified company front then I suppose I should have been talking about "web design agencies" all the time. Clearly the actual coder is the one with the biggest impact on SEO but I suspect that in even the smallest multi-person design agencies (maybe "collective" is a better term here) it is likely that the designer will be the client interface since most customers want to discuss how the site looks and feels (and maybe SEO) rather than whether a lambda function or a closure would be appropriate in a particular piece of PHP code (and the customers that do want to discuss the code details should probably not be let near the developer anyhow because they would most likely be highly disruptive).

Both Joomla & WP need to be modded to make them properly SEF, Drupal is very good. This is the problem though, in that it is easy for the designer to mess things up for you. WP & to an extent joomla, will serve the same content from different URL's for example, and this needs to be addresses immediately as part of the SEF efforts.

Given that I know I want a CMS what you (OldWelshGuy) say above actually seems to me to be something of a killer question. Once I've settled on who is on the shortlist to do my site, and hence also on what CMS it might use, then asking the developer what mods they make to the CMS to make it SEF friendly might elicit interesting responses. Complete ignorance of the issues wouldn't be encouraging.

- Julian

[Julian]

One other thing I should have mentioned right up front....

My site will not be an eCommerce site, it will not have an online shop. The site will be a corporate presence site with brochure-type information on a single product. Due to the relatively high value and large range of configuration options for the product all sales will be in person and in virtually all cases face-to-face.

- Julian