So how do you find a designer that knows about SEO and it’s role in achieving great rankings? Read this article to find out...

An SEO consultant is usually faced with two kinds of sites; a site that has been previously designed, and a site whether the design process is ongoing or in it’s initial stages. In this article, we’ll tell you about some of the pros and cons faced by the SEO consultant.

First of all, if we come in after the design has been completed there will more than likely be some structural and/or design issues that will need to be addressed. In Australia, typically most web designers aren’t up to speed with how to design a search engine friendly website, so structural issues will be enough of a headache. On the plus side, in this type of scenario the designer is usually out of the picture meaning we can make changes without a designer taking it to heart.

The other scenario is working with a web designer to implement a web site from the beginning. The obvious con here is a designer taking it personally when we suggest structural changes be made to their precious design. A site built entirely in Flash is very cool and visually attractive, but it is death from an SEO point of view.

If you have an opportunity to work with a designer who knows how important SEO is, then this is a great balance in achieving a great website. As an SEO consultant, I may have an idea in mind to make a site more easily navigated by a search engine, but if I have a designer on my team then we’re sure to come up with a solution that is both workable (from an SEO view) and visually appealing.

So how do you find a designer that knows about SEO and it’s role in achieving great rankings? Here are a few things that an SEO-friendly web designer will be doing:-

Using clean code
A skilled web designer will have a good grasp of CSS and will put all main formatting in these files. Sometimes designers will have enormous amounts of code on a page, and this gives the search engines a lot more to crawl through when looking for content. Tables are another issue, but there are ways to minimise the amount of code a table will put into a page.

Linking to internal pages
An SEO-friendly designer will ensure that pages are linked to other internal pages of the site. These pages will rank for longtail keyword phrases. Too often sites will target high priority phrases on the home page, but it’s the internal pages that need to be easily found by the spiders. To do this a good designer will link to these pages with text (not images), and the anchor text will include the relevant keywords.

Text-based and CSS-based navigation system
Even though an image-based navigation system looks fantastic, it’s not going to help your key pages get found and indexed quickly. A designer should be using a text-based or CSS-based navigation system as opposed to JavaScript or Ajax. If a designer is using a script-based navigation for visual appeal that’s OK, as long as there are text links within the footer or other navigation area for the spiders to crawl.

Optimising pages
An SEO-friendly designer knows not to stuff too many keywords into the content of a page. Too many times we see a website with so many keywords on a page it becomes more like a sales pitch, and therefore difficult for a user to read.  Keywords do need to be added to the content, but a density of around 3% is usually a good aim. That and keeping the content easily read by your users.

An SEO-friendly designer will add title tags, descriptions and image tags as they are building the site. This of course saves having to go in at a later date to add this information.

This is just a handful of things an SEO-friendly designer will be doing. If your designer is doing most of these things listed above then you’re onto a winner.