Or does it just drive you crazy like everyone else?
As we've said before, putting together a quality website takes work from a lot of different angles. But, it doesn't matter how visual, engaging—even award winning—your site is, if you aren't pulling in traffic, it isn't do its main goal: to get people flocking to your site. After all, meeting in the middle of both proper design and search engine optimization is paramount to your success.
Here are some quick ways to make sure your site is optimized to get people there, as well as getting them where they need to go. Because of this, SEO is all about focus—the worst websites/sources are convoluted, spammed with ad after ad with useless information from here to the horizon. Get over that way of thought, because when it comes to your Google Rank, more is never better: it's all about clarity.
Each page of content should be directed at one, specific keyword phrase, long tail or otherwise. What that means is, if you have a site discussing something like different varieties of doughnuts, the page on Boston Crème shouldn’t have all the other types (that’s the only one I can think of, do they all have names?). It should only be about Boston Crèmes. The header should say Boston Crème. The alt tags on the images should read: Boston Crème. Noticing a trend here?
What you need to do is pick one keyword and optimize your various content around that. That means it should be in the header, title, text, and URL—naturally. If you alienate your viewers due to awkward sentences or keyword spam, you’re doing just as much harm as not using keywords at all. Images are important too, as they not only provide the reader with a visual, they also add another opportunity to utilize further SEO purposes. But how does all of this fit into the new craze of responsive website designs, and how does it change?
There are many questions you need to ask. This process revolves more around what kind of responsive design you utilize, as not all were created equally. Some focus less on copy and more on visualization, which can make following the traditional rules of SEO to the new design.
<-- Feel like your work's cut out for you? It is. You certainly want to make it simple for Google to index in the search results, but you want to remember why you’re creating it in the first place—you can’t change everything to appease the higher powers at Google; you want to make sure you’re appeasing the right people: your target audience. For that reason, responsive designs sometimes have trouble getting indexed, or maybe only one of your site’s pages are indexed... and that’s certainly a problem. If the responsive design is too dynamic, you may find that it’s outsmarting itself in it’s own SEO efforts, hiding URL’s and other keyword-laden content from search engines.
You also need to think about your browsers… as, again, not all were created equally (shout out to my boys Netscape and Internet Explorer*). JavaScript can sometimes be a game breaker due to the web’s heavy reliance on the platform. What you don’t want is to design something that works great on one or two browsers, that's completely un-functional on others. That’s the whole reason for the advent of responsive design—our culture of mobility is transforming the industry, and tablets and smartphones are quickly becoming the go-to entrances for website/Internet access. And with Google now only tracking analytics from responsive sights (static mobile sites need to look elsewhere), you can see the push is being made to marrying both the analytics and SEO with the responsive design.
What are some of the top issues you or your organization is running into? Remember, there isn't a general answer for every pain point, but by putting in the effort and taking on the project holistically, you'll find that it was well worth the effort.
