Creative web solutions

How To Avoid Being Ripped-Off for SEO
by Mike Tekula

The advantage web designers have over many of their clients is the posession of a highly-specialized body of knowledge. Let's face it - there's a reason you're employing their services. It may be that you know something about web design but don't have the time to build your own pages. If so you are better off than many. The people who don't know much, if anything, about web design can have a real problem. There is a reason for the stigma attached to lawyers, auto mechanics, car salesman, etc. - namely, they know things you don't know, and sharing that information with you, as ethical as it may be, is not always beneficial to their bottom line. The fact is that people aren't always as honest as we'd hope. The question is: how do you protect yourself?

Many web developers are now also offering SEO service packages to ensure that the website they build for you will be found. The days of putting together a decent web site, adding meta tags and watching it show up on page one of search engine results are long gone. This arrives from the same fact that makes the internet so viable a resource for many businesses and individuals - the low amount of investment required. Anyone with an idea and some extra time can put together a website. The problem now is how to be found among a sea of competitors. The question you may already be asking - and if you aren't you should be - is how much SEO has to do with the actual construction of a website. The short answer: quite a bit.

What's stopping a dishonest web designer from building your web page using faulty or out-dated coding methods and then turning around and charging you for SEO? What if they build layout with tables, use aging Javascript roll-over image functions, display all content within images or Flash movies or any of the other methods that can be detrimental to your website's SEO?

The absolute best thing you can do is educate yourself prior to discussing your project with anyone. Of course probably most web designers will be honest and up-front with you about your project requirements. There are sure to be a few, however, that will cut corners or be outright dishonest in order to make themselves more money.

So what do you need to know?

Probably the most important concept to familiarize yourself with are the W3C Standards. The W3 Convention has been setting the standards for web page coding practices for years, and sites that keep up to W3C standards use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), another key term, to separate content from presentation. websites fully utilizing the power of CSS see a boost in search engine rankings. A big reason for this is the fact that storing your presentation parameters in a separate CSS file cleans up HTML code dramatically. In a recent project, for example, Tek Web Solutions rebuilt a client's rollover navigation menu using CSS in the place of an aging Javascript method. The result was the removal of approximately 75 lines from each page of HTML code and faster load times. In the eyes of a crawler like Googlebot this is a vast improvement as the content is that much more readily available.

Another way in which CSS is beneficial for SEO concerns is that it allows designers to break from an aging "table-based" layout system. This again has to do with the separation of content and presentation. Table-based layouts almost always contain size, width, border, background and other properties in the HTML itself. Even when they don't they cause for confusing code containing countless nested layers of <table> <tr> and <td> tags that slow down the crawlers and put your content that much farther from the top of your document. Furthermore, table-based layouts

Ideally you should know as much about how you want your website to be built before you contact a web designer. The same way you wouldn't show up at a used car dealership and say, "I have no idea how cars function or how to measure their performance or reliability, but I need one to get around," you should be prepared to discuss at least some of the particulars of web design with your prospective developer. At the very least you'll be showing them that you aren't entirely clueless about the standards of web design as they pertain to solid SEO, and your willingness to learn will go a long way in encouraging if not ensuring their honesty.