The thing is, there’s something very revealing, refreshing and sobering about actually watching people on your site. It’s somehow not as dry as analysing yesterday’s data. It’s a bit like the difference between a CD and a live gig, a bit rough round the edges but more real. Watching your SEO efforts work, as a sought after key phrase bears fruit, only to lose the searcher within 5 seconds because the page isn’t good enough really focusses the mind!

But watching your prized phrases isn’t all the voyeuristic SEO can glean from some real-time guerilla work. If you create lot’s of content your site will be attracting plenty of long tail traffic. Sometimes the traffic is landing on a long forgotten deep linked page you last looked at a year ago. Seeing it attracting traffic refocuses the mind on that missing call to action or sloppy layout.

I spent about an hour on some real time SEO analysis this week. The end result was some significant improvements to some neglected pages of our site. I’ll keep you posted on the fruits of these efforts in a future post.

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We bill ourselves as SEO Web Designers, this means we build sites that search engines can index. But we also make sure the sites we build look after the visitors when they arrive. By this we mean the sites try to make sure the visitor feels comfortable, reassured they have made a good choice when clicking a link to a website and most importantly they believe the site is going to answer their question, solve their problem or sell them what they need. If they get this feeling they may stay on the site, if they don’t they’ll leave.

Design is a funny subject. One man’s meat really is another man’s poison. However you can dislike a design but still use it effectively if the design is good. If I hire a car I might not like the look of the car, but if it gets me to where I need to get to, I’m happy.

Given that your design will please some and not please others it’s important that it delivers your message/product effectively. Some people will leave quickly purely because they don’t like your design but in my view, not many. Lots of people will leave if they land on your page and either can’t find what they are looking for or are confused about what they need to do to find what they are looking for. As Steve Krug preaches, don’t make them think.

Good design and proven usability are just as important as getting a good search engine placement. In short build a great site that users can use and tweak it till you get it right.

Take our site for example. Because of our breadth of offerings our site was becoming complex and confusing. We looked at our analytics and realised we have two types of visitors. Those looking for web development information and Joomla templates and those looking for SEO information. So we simplified our homepage to reflect this.

Look after those hard won visitors and reap the rewards of your SEO efforts.

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• Each page allows for Search Engine Friendly (human readable) URL’s. You should be able to manipulate these.

• Each page has a unique title tag. Again you need to be able to manipulate these on a per page basis. Keywords in title tags are VERY useful.

• Each page allows for a unique meta description tag. For the most part Google uses the meta description tag for the text snippet it displays in the search engine results page or SERP.

• Each page allows for unique meta keywords. Although considered redundant it’s better to be safe than sorry with meta keywords

• The content management system (CMS) should allow for the easy addition of site wide code to aid the use of website analytics software a VITAL tool in the SEO process

• The CMS should automatically update its site map and create an XML feed to ensure Google is informed immediately of any site additions. Doing this manually is NOT recommended.
• The CMS should as far as possible use clean CSS based design to reduce the ratio of content to HTML on each page. This makes it easier for the search engine robots to establish the subject matter within a page

• The CMS should promote and assist the use of correct on-page HTML tagging, such as H1 for the most important headings. Again this helps the search engine robots correctly index a page

• The CMS should ensure canonical issues are considered and dealt with. In simple terms each page should as far as possible have only ONE version.

All of the above, and more, play their part in the way a website performs in the search engines. Ensuring your system ticks these boxes is vital. Getting this bit wrong will prove expensive.

So many CMS systems make life difficult for their users. The last thing you want to do is spend money on a site only to discover the search engines can’t make any sense of it.

If doing all these things on your site is a fraught exercise you are making your SEO harder than it needs to be or worse, you are not doing your SEO because it’s such pain in the arse.

Using a good Content Management System will allow you to manage your site and carry out your SEO in a pain free way. There are many very capable systems out there both free and commercial. Our tool of choice is a mature Open Source system that makes running a well SEO’d site a breeze.

Go on, take the line of least resistance, you know you want to.

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