Do You Need SEO?

It was interesting to notice how many requests for SEO we had for the past year (the SEO requests substitute for our typical design jobs). This fact might raise the question: Do you need SEO? The answer to that is: You need a good web designer!

Here is what you need:

• Original website content
• An excellent web designer who respects the web standards
• Good site architecture
• Keyword research
• A few good websites that link to your website

And THAT is ALL you need in order to have a successful website!

So here we come into play. We are primary a web design company and we also consider that our expertise in SEO will benefit our clients. Often times our current and prospective clients contact us with regard to SEO jobs. Sometimes it is problematic to clarify to them how SEO works, why they need it, how it can be achieved, etc. So when someone came to us for an SEO related job, we encouraged them to opt for a redesign of the website.

Why a redesign? SEO is evolving much faster than SEO companies can adapt, and this is a fact not loudly stated and never mentioned to clients. SEO Companies are happy to cash in the money for a job that in one year will be obsolete. We experience this. We tried so hard to get those PR5 inlinks, just to realize after one year that they had gone (changed) to PR0. We also created useful pages on Wikipedia about a client product to learn later on that Google does not consider those links anymore. We paid for directory inclusions and we found that it is not beneficial, in fact it makes no difference. We thought that this is White Hat SEO or Ethical Search Engine Optimization.

Well, at this point, we considered that this is simply not worth it and is a tremendous loss of time and money. Search engines are gigantic corporations with massive resources. For instance, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft MSN, are all worth billions of dollars. Their purpose is to serve the user by providing the best results. They have a tremendous number of engineers that work around the clock to create algorithms so the most relative results will be in front. They work hard to detect and measure the links’ authenticity, link buying, deceptive websites, etc. Also, they change their algorithms often. They address the users’ requests not the SEO companies’. In fact, they don’t even recommend SEO related jobs. It is unrealistic to think that you can fool the search engines in the long run.

So, if you don’t transform your site to make it user friendly, and to respect all search engine guidelines, to link the pages properly inside your site, in less than a year your website will hardly get any traffic from your SEO work.

Incoming links are good but search engines started developing algorithms to detect what links are without any merit. Instead of losing days to try and post your website in directories and links-exchange schemes, you should write good articles and descriptions about a service or product that users will find useful. You should make users’ experiences as good as possible. In time, people might link to your website and even recommend it to other people and your website traffic will hence grow. This is what search engine are trying to measure: the quality of your website. They will notice if you are trying to build links: it is not usual that the same website with the same amount of information and structure all of the sudden has lots of links.

What is the conclusion? Present your information properly for both people and the search engines at the same time. A good web designer will achieve this for you. That’s all the SEO you will ever need. In time, your site will get much traffic with better results and no long term SEO contracts.

Contact Us