There are still a surprising number of web designers who do not take search engines into consideration when designing a website. At Web.com Search Agency, we know this because people come to us and ask why they aren’t getting any traction in Google. Normally it takes only a few seconds to see that the site has been designed entirely in Flash, or it has a bad title, or its on-page content has been embedded in images. Any one of these factors can effectively make your site invisible to search engines. A classic design mistake is to have a homepage title that begins with “Welcome to” and ends with the business name. Usually this mistake is repeated on every page. At a more advanced level (if there is such a thing as advanced incompetence) there are designers who use every JavaScript trick in the book, from flyout menus that can’t be read by search spiders, to cursor tricks that looked neat back in 1997. When we see a new site that looks like it was designed for a free web hosting space, we don’t usually have to look too hard to find readability problems.

At the other end are modern looking ecommerce sites with shopping carts that are definitely not SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or the process of getting your site found on search engines) friendly. This is kind of surprising to us because a search engine friendly shopping cart can be the difference between success and failure for a company, and we are always telling our customers to go back and ask the cart designer for SEO features like unique titles, search engine friendly URLs (also referred to as mod rewrites in PHP) and XML sitemap functionality. A proper shopping cart should also be able to spit out a Google Shopping feed (AKA a Froogle Feed) for Google Base, which adds your product list to the world of Google. Many open source shopping carts have available upgrades for a few dollars more, or built by third party entrepreneurs, but this is also an indicator of poor planning on behalf of the shopping cart designer. A truly competitive online shopping cart would have all of these features in place at the base level. Shopping carts that aren’t SEO friendly are a disservice to their customers, because the whole idea of selling things online involves getting found in the internet arenas where sales are made.

How do you find out if your web designer does SEO friendly work? How can you tell if the shopping cart you want is search engine compatible? Ask for working samples. Even if you don’t know what to look for, most search engine optimization companies can look at the sample and tell you what would be lacking if the same model was applied to you. For shopping carts, you can always do a query in Google with the question “Is (shopping cart name here) SEO friendly” or “(cart name) SEO problem” and see what comes out. Many shopping carts have updated themselves over the past few years, so if you see forum postings that are old, find out if upgrades have been made. Finally, if the shopping cart salesperson tells you that the cart isn’t friendly yet but an update is on the way, you may want to look elsewhere, since such updates can take years and may not bestow full functionality. We had one customer find out that the update worked for the “new build” of the cart, but he could not update his cart because he had the “old build” and making a change would ruin his existing rankings.

(Special note: Given that our parent company Web.com practices SEO friendly web design, we would be remiss if we did not make a note of that fact in this posting.)

Finally, you should see if your web designer has basic SEO knowledge. Many self-styled webmasters will claim to know everything about SEO, in which case you should ask for examples of superior placement. Search engine optimization firms usually will work with your webmaster for updates, but there is often friction when a webmaster says that the business owner “doesn’t need” to add content, change titles, add analytics, or fix several small items that slow search engine spiders. Sometimes a webmaster will be using SEO tricks that worked five years ago, but will get you thrown out of the Google rankings today. A certain degree of SEO knowledge on the webmaster’s behalf will ensure that basic tenets of search spiderability are in place during the design phase. Advanced agency advice can help in the naming of files, pages, and images. Agencies can also write or edit SEO content in order to ensure that “keyword blurring” does not confuse the search engines and leave you with artificially low rankings. No matter what the size of your new site or redesign, an SEO compatible site design produces dividends in the form of cheap daily traffic for your business website.