Questions to ask re: building an SEO friendly website?

[silverpuresilver]

What questions should I be proposing to web builders / designers regarding the creation of a very search engine friendly website.

I appreciate that the content is one of the most important elements, but in actually constructing a website, what should I ask of a designer / builder?

EG: I have been advised recently, that my current site is a 'php driven site which is not the easiest for search engines to follow'. Obviously if this is a real sticking point, I wouldn't want another site built the same way.

Thanks!

Karen

 

[ken_uk]

php in itself has nothing whatsoever to do with making a site difficult for search engines to follow.

Bad use of php does.

A well coded php site, by someone who understands seo, and is good with what they do, will not cause any problems for a search engine.

 

What questions should I be proposing to web builders / designers regarding the creation of a very search engine friendly website.




Karen

None

you should be talking to an SEO before you contemplate having the site built.


Earl

 

[silverpuresilver]

Ok, so a well designed PHP site should be ok - how can I tell if mine is a well designed PHP site!!!

Earl, would an SEO advise me what to demand from a web designer / builder?

 

[dotwhack]

Hi - I think it might be a god idea to read through this thread from the other day - it goes through what you should be looking for.

However the most important thing is to use the right keywords - even if your site is SEO firendly, if you've not got the right keywords, it won't work. IMO web designers/developers will implement SEO for you but they wont research which keywords to use - you need to tell them what you want it optimising for. This involves quite a lot of research and using SEO tools.

Then it's a case of building good inbound links for relevant sites.

SEO isn't a quick one off process - it's an ongoing process and you won't get to page 1 of google overnight.

 

[awebapart.com]

Firstly there is a difference between a site being search engine friendly and a site being search engine optimised. Friendly means you've got the basics covered, allowing search engines to index your site. Optimised means that you are trying to squeeze extra performance out of your site using more advanced techniques to improve its search engine ranking.

EG: I have been advised recently, that my current site is a 'php driven site which is not the easiest for search engines to follow'.

This is simply bad and incorrect advice. Search engines are following your site, they are indexing your site, you can see what pages the search engines have indexed on your site by using the site:silverpuresilver.com command. So in this respect your site has basic search engine friendliness, even though your site has some way to go to be search engine optimised (e.g. titles changing for different categories and products). The underlying platform php has nothing to do with it, how your site is configured and coded does have an impact though.

The best thing to ask any web supplier is for examples of the sites they have created, and examples where those sites do well in searches, preferably for competitive terms, and ask how much of this success is down to onsite SEO (the site itself) and how much is down to offsite SEO (inbound links from other sites).

p.s. you really shouldn't have silverpuresilver.co.uk hosted against the same website as silverpuresilver.com - this will incur duplicate content penalties from google, and it might divide your inbound links (which site to link to). You should web forward one domain onto the other hosted domain (perhaps web forward the .co.uk to the .com since google sees the .com as your first main domain).

 

Earl, would an SEO advise me what to demand from a web designer / builder?

An SEO will advise you on what structure the site requires ,or more importantly discusss with your designer/developer what would be best for SEO purposes.

In this life its not a good idea to demand anything from anyone.


Earl

 

[creospace]

Bad php code simply doesn't work it's got nothing to do with SEO really. The PHP code instructs the server to build a page in html and shove out to the browser. It's a case of bad data in bad data out so a developer should follow the instruction of an SEO guide as really, i'll try to do an example...

You hire a painter to paint your house, It makes no difference to the painter what colour he paints the house be it red, pink or blue etc so the paint expert (the seo) tells him to paint it blue. Job done. But if you wanted red and nto blue then now there's a big problem!

 

[silverpuresilver]

DotWhack - could you post the link please!!!

Earl - apologies, I don't normally 'demand' things from people!!! Thanks for the note about duplicate content, that is certainly worth noting for future use.

Excuse my ignorance, but shouldn't a good web designer / builder understand how to build a website to make it search engine optimised?

Do most people consult an SEO before commissioning a web designer?

 

Do most people consult an SEO before commissioning a web designer?

No they don't .They have a site built and think that on its own will make them rich.

There are web designers who are good at SEO,but in the main web designers are working to hard developing there skills and building sites to be able to study SEO in depth.

As an SEO I study SEO and nothing else,hence I am a crap web designer,

Earl

 

[RayB]

Have a look at THIS THREAD from last month, it explains what to brief the designer to make a SEO friendly site

 

[awebapart.com]

shouldn't a good web designer / builder understand how to build a website to make it search engine optimised?

To some extent yes. There are different levels of being search engine optimised, since optimisation is about squeezing out performance and how much performance do want to squeeze out for a given budget. At the very least good web designers / builders should product search engine friendly sites, and if the client asks for something that isn't search engine friendly (e.g. a Flash site or graphics heavy site) then they should make the client aware of this. As with any supplier trade, there are a lot of things that good suppliers should do, but it doesn't necessaily mean that all suppliers do it.

A lot also depends on who is the solution provider. If you are getting some design agency to design the graphic design for your website layout, then passing this on to a web designer to do some one-off coding, then you are the solution provider just outsourcing parts of your solution and it is down to you to specify these thing (possibly outsourcing to an SEO to come up with the SEO requirements too). If on the other hand you are going to a supplier asking for an overall solution, then that supplier should be including SEO advice and some implementation as part of the solution, since there's a lot more to getting a web presence than just getting a website. Since our sitebuilder service is an overall solution we include SEO advice right from the start (including the sometimes all-important selection of domain names) and on an ongoing basis. SEO is an ongoing project.

Do most people consult an SEO before commissioning a web designer?

From my experience no. In fact most people will do most things in the wrong order when it comes to getting a website. They will start their ecommerce site before conducting market research and analysing how competitive the marketplace is. They will select domain names before thinking about SEO. They will buy hosting before knowing the hosting requirements and hosting SEO requirements for their website. They will select graphic heavy flashy designs before thinking about SEO (style over substance). They will commission and partially pay upfront for expensive custom designed and developed websites before and without getting a client-supplier contract in place. They will commission graphic designers to design the visual look of their ecommerce system without taking into account the underlying features of the ecommerce system they will use (if they have even chosen it at this stage), and without taking into account whether the design will map onto the ecommerce system. SEO normally occurs to them later down the line when they realise they're not getting any visitors to their website.

 

[silverpuresilver]

What a lot of great information - thank so much!!!

However, I don't understand what Canonicalisation is ????? - that link was great advice and is a good starting point, and most is on my list of basic requirements.

All your advice has been much appreciated!!

Karen

 

[RayB]

However, I don't understand what Canonicalisation is ?????

Karen

As long as your designer understands it that's the main thing.

The main issue with canonicalisation is that there is both a www and non www version of a domain. (these are canonical domains). The designer should re-direct one to the other using a .htaccess file.

There are other issues as well, regarding url endings (trailing "/" or not, index.php/index.html or not etc)

More info here

 

[awebapart.com]

Before everyone starts to worry about canonicalisation, the main issue with canonicalisation isn't the www (e.g. www.awebapart.com) and non-www issue (e.g. http://awebapart.com) and whether the non-www should redirect to the www, it is an issue of whether you have a split of links to duplicate home pages. The most common issue is a site that has a home page at www . domain . com when you first visit the site, then has internal links to their home page to www . domain . com / index.php (or index.htm, index.html, index.asp, index.aspx etc).

The www/non-www isn't such an issue (as long as your site doesn't link to its non-www version), in most cases for inbound links people will link to the www. part of your domain, in fact most sites like forums wont automatically hyperlink awebapart.com without the www. in front of it. It only becomes an issue if a lot of people start linking to the non-www part of your site.

Canonicalisation for the www non www part isn't a major issue, it is one of those nice to haves further along the line as you start to squeeze more SEO out of your site. It certainly shouldn't be number 1 in any priority ordered checklist (the list in the link was an 'off the top of the head' list).

Towards the top of any SEO list should be getting the basic search engine friendliness in place first - so that search engines can crawl the pages of your site.

 

[RayB]

The most common issue is a site that has a home page at www . domain . com when you first visit the site, then has internal links to their home page to www . domain . com / index.php.

I agree with you on this, it is a major problem, and I'm staggered by how many sites i see suffering from this

The www/non-www isn't such an issue, in most cases for inbound links people will link to the www. part of your domain, in fact most sites like forums wont automatically hyperlink awebapart.com without the www. in front of it.

I disagree with you on this. If you're gonna fix the first issue you might as well sort all the others, it's a piece of cake to upload a .htaccess file to the root.

People *do* link back using all sorts, why waste the juice??

even mydomain/keyword and mydomain/keyword/ are entirely different urls

 

[awebapart.com]

People *do* link back using all sorts

Granted, it does becomes more of an issue the more different people that link back to your site.

But like everything, especially with an overall ecommerce solution, things have to be prioritised, not just the SEO issues but all the other issues with setting up an ecommerce solution.

As for the original poster, the higher priority issue Karen has at the moment, is not so much the www and non-www issue, but the .co.uk and .com issue (both hosting the same site).

 

[silverpuresilver]

sorry guys, I have to say that you have completely lost me on that one!!!

 

[RayB]

Granted, it does becomes more of an issue the more different people that link back to your site.

But like everything, especially with an overall ecommerce solution, things have to be prioritised, not just the SEO issues but all the other issues with setting up an ecommerce solution.

Sure things have to be prioritised, but a .htaccess file covering all the bases should be a 10 minute job for a coder, and as such I still say it should be standard feature of any site.

I certainly wouldn't launch a new site without this simple issue having been addressed - especially as it's such an easy thing to do

 

[RayB]

sorry guys, I have to say that you have completely lost me on that one!!!

The main thing is to tell your designer you want it sorted, don't worry too much about trying to grasp the technicalities

 

[silverpuresilver]

OK, have read up on Canonicalisation - seems to make sense - thanks!!!

 

[emailblaster]

Its a good idea to get a designer who works with someone who has online marketing knowledge. The ideal website would be built buy a techy but designed buy an online marketing expert. That way you get the best of both worlds.

 

[CharlieWasAnAngel]

Apparently urls with extra bit on the end like mypage.aspx?id=1232&mystuff=sdf (I don't know php so don't know what the syntax would be) are not as easy for google to crawl - but I've had large hits on pages that have query strings (the extra bits) on the end. However if you wanted to make it friendlier towards google, then just get a url re-writer which will change your existing url into one like /1232/sdf/mypage.aspx.

 

[RayB]

Apparently urls with extra bit on the end like mypage.aspx?id=1232&mystuff=sdf (I don't know php so don't know what the syntax would be) are not as easy for google to crawl - but I've had large hits on pages that have query strings (the extra bits) on the end. However if you wanted to make it friendlier towards google, then just get a url re-writer which will change your existing url into one like /1232/sdf/mypage.aspx.

Or better still: mydomain.com/my-keyword/

 

[CharlieWasAnAngel]

Or better still: mydomain.com/my-keyword/

Would you say that the url format mydomain.com/my-keyword/ works better than the format mydomain.com/12/23/mypage.aspx?

 

[RayB]

Would you say that the url format mydomain.com/my-keyword/ works better than the format mydomain.com/12/23/mypage.aspx?

Yes indeed, and if you have different product categories and even better url stucture is:

mydomain.com/keyword/sub-keyword-1/

mydomain.com/keyword/sub-keyword-2/

etc

 

[DotNetWebs]

Would you say that the url format mydomain.com/my-keyword/ works better than the format mydomain.com/12/23/mypage.aspx?

As RayB says above it's definitely worth rewriting you URLs to include you keywords where possible.

If, as you seem to imply, you have already used a rewriter on your .apsx pages; it should not be very hard to go that extra step.

Regards

Dotty

 

[CharlieWasAnAngel]

Yes indeed, and if you have different product categories and even better url stucture is:

mydomain.com/keyword/sub-keyword-1/

mydomain.com/keyword/sub-keyword-2/

etc

Why is the one format better than the other?

 

[RayB]

Why is the one format better than the other?

It's another cog of on-site SEO (a slight SEO benefit in the algos) and helps massively in the SERP's to get the click as your KW's are bolded and help to tell the searcher what your page is about

 

[CharlieWasAnAngel]

It's another cog of on-site SEO (a slight SEO benefit in the algos) and helps massively in the SERP's to get the click as your KW's are bolded and help to tell the searcher what your page is about

Does this mean that there is no real reason, it's just the way the search engines prefer them?

 

[CharlieWasAnAngel]

Does this mean that there is no real reason, it's just the way the search engines prefer them?

sorry..have read the answer again - the long words and jargon confused me... You mean that people are more likely to click on a url that makes sense to them? So wouldn't this mean that so long as the rewritten url is human-friendly, it doesn't really matter what it is?

 

[AndyBlack]

The majority of people do not know about, or think about SEO. I have seen it too often (even recently) where people get a website set up and then expect the doors to burst open with traffic and sales. So so wrong. When people are at the stage...they have a long way to go. As for you people reading this thread. You are the minority... or at least heading that way. Well done.

Andy