Pixel Liberation Front

I work for a design and maketing company in the northeast of the UK and recently we found we had a need a new developer.

During the process of looking through CV we notced that some of the candidtates were making claims of having SEO skills. This is something that one of our directors began to pepper every conversation with as he wants to add this to the list of services.

Previously, I've been reluctant to get involved in it because I dont feel confident I can manage customers expectations properly so that when they dont get to number one on the google listings they turn on us and sue.

But now that these guys are on the horizon I wondered, "Do I know enought about SEO myself to know if these guys are talking rubbish?"

Then again does anyone know enought about it to say they can spot a fraud?

Mike

That's a very good question Mike.

SEO is still a bit of an occult art, and there's room for a lot of different opinions and approaches on it.

Personally, I'm waking up to the vital importance of SEO as part of design. It's the critical first step in a visitor's experience of your brand, and the beginning of the conversation you have with them. All apart from the fact that it's probably the best-value investment you can make in your site.

For me, there are some basic steps to SEO:

• Working out your market - what message/conversation do you want to have, and with whom?
• What's your offering? Analyse the ideal customers as much as possible.
• Keyword research. What are the people who will end up being your perfect visitors looking for online? What search terms will deliver the best value? Niche or broad?
• Information Architecture. Make sure your directories & page names reflect the right meaning.
• Get your basic production sorted out: High content-to-filesize ratio (clean markup); Full set of meta tags in place; Good internal links, with meaningful, descriptive text; Good headings.
• Link-building. Getting your site on the relevant directories (general, geo-specific, domain-specific), DMOZ, and as many relevant sites as possible. The more relevant the better.

Then, after those basics are in place, you have an optmised site. The next level comes with:

• Analysing how people use the site, where they drop out, why, what you can do about it.
• Writing great content that draws people, draws organic links, gets return traffic, gets you quoted etc. This is one of the areas we've found people can be weak on. I think the complete SEO person needs to be a great writer or editor.
• Working other channels to build exposure and relevance, including mailing lists, Twitter, Facebook, Google AdWords ads, Facebook ads (which are great value for money right now), del.icio.us, digg etc.

That's as far as I go with SEO/SEM. I don't know if there's anything in there you didn't already know.

Ben

Well I havent really taken twitter seriously before as a way to expose sites to more traffic sources.

But more recently I have been seeing on a personal level, my own site has started getting some nice trickles of traffic from forums that I've frequented.

I'm starting to see that at a good way to get a flow of visitors on the go for free while I'm on that forum anyway, which is what I doo on a daily basis really, (mostly Ubuntuforums and CodeIgniter as they're my passion atm :D )

On reflection, I suppose being dyslexic, I tend to shy away from writting large amounts of text, but I guess I need to motivate myself more :D as, like said, text and content in the form that can be parsed and stored is really more the type of stuff you want on a site along side your super dooper designs.

On another note, I've interviewed three guys so far and they all claim to be SEO capable. Upon close inspection, only one of them was unreluctant to talk through thier approach to treating clients sites.

I guess thats a good sign that they are just trying to treat agencies like google hehe, bumping up their search listings with employers so to speak with good word counts for things like PHP and Javascript and Mysql etc. And so it goes that we selected them because we were the metiphorical, "employment google", searcher that typed "SEO" along with others keywords when we asked the agencies to source some potential staff :D

Mike

Keyword-stuffing job applications... As if we could sink no lower

I suppose the process is pretty much the same when I think about it :D

You identify who would want you as an employee and drop in the buzz words to get them to look closer, Then we fill it with manageable chunks of info that convince the employer we're the one for the job.

If fact its EXACTLY like website SEO! :D

Mike