Archive for May, 2010

What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you’ve ever devoted some time to thinking about that classical Eastern riddle, then you might be ready for one of my strongest – and strangest – pieces of search engine optimization advice: forget about it.

Because of the enormous bottom-line implications that come with a top listing on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, SEO has become a major industry in and of itself. Dozens of books have been written, thousands of websites are devoted to the topic, and hundreds more web design professionals like myself work at it every day of the week, so I can understand if you’re a little bit confused about my suggestion to just toss that part of your online marketing strategy aside.

Before you go thinking I’ve lost my marbles, however, let me explain: SEO is important, and you should do everything you can to cover the basics on your site. If you haven’t gotten a professional to optimize your page headers, tags, and other major details, get started on that today. Beyond that, though, it’s a good idea to forget about the search engine spiders for a while. Why? Because so many marketers and business owners become obsessed with having the right keywords scattered throughout their pages that they start to miss the point – getting paying customers to visit your website and stay there.

Automated computer programs don’t buy goods or services, people do. So when you’re putting together your product descriptions, company profiles, or online articles, do the smart thing and write to another person. Don’t let the temptation to worry about “keyword density” or “long tail search parameters” destroy what you wanted to say; just make your point in normal, everyday language.

For one thing, this will probably end up improving your actual search performance. Because so many marketers and dubious search engine “experts” try to fool the system, Google and other engines will actually punish you if they think your writing is designed to increase traffic.

More to the point, though, good old human-to-human communication remains the best way to sell. All the traffic in the world doesn’t mean anything if the people who come to your website immediately leave, and the only way they’re going to stay is if they find something that’s interesting and/or informative. There might be dozens of ways to attract automated spiders, but no one has come up with a better way to hold a person’s attention than by simply writing about what matters to them.

It might sound silly to remind you about how important search engine optimization is, and then tell you not to worry about it so much in the next breath. But the fact the matter is the best SEO comes naturally. If you simply concentrate on adding solid content to your site regularly, you’re sure to gain hundreds of new readers, automated and otherwise.

Sometimes, we invent a lot of words for things that are basically the same. For example, I think that most of us would agree that an attorney is pretty much the same as a lawyer, and a college is very similar to a university. While there might be some minor differences here and there, we tend to use the terms interchangeably without anyone having too much trouble understanding what we mean.

Once in a while, though, things aren’t quite that easy. For instance, even though they sound a bit close and both concern stars and planets, a person who signed up for a course on astronomy and ended up learning about astrology would be disappointed. I mention this because it’s not uncommon to hear clients refer to graphic designers and web designers as basically the same thing.

Is there a difference? And does it matter? You bet it does! While it’s true that both graphic designers and web designers are artistic professionals that can make your marketing materials pop, there is a degree of specialty to each. Traditionally, graphic designers work on print materials, like brochures, annual reports, and magazine advertisements. Web designers, on the other hand, spend as much time working with code as we do images – we worry about CSS, screen sizes, and HTML tags rather than paper stock or ink variations.

That extra bit of specialty can be more important than you might think. That’s because a profitable small business website isn’t just a pretty picture – it’s a piece of online art backed by some kind of coding. It needs to function perfectly for a variety of people using more than a dozen computer platforms and Internet browsers. Getting ink to look great on the page isn’t easy, but pulling the same colors and images out of a thousand different laptops and monitors at the same time is a whole different kind of challenge.

For that reason, you need to be careful hiring graphic designers without any coding experience to lay out your site. There definitely are talented web professionals working at firms that do print work, but the skills aren’t interchangeable. Working with websites requires a different set of skills, knowledge, and even software to make sure that what you see on the screen is going to translate properly into a working site. Sometimes these differences aren’t easy to spot at first glance. That’s because a client’s initial look at their new website is usually in the form of an image mockup. Since the image doesn’t really have to do anything, it can be made to look like a million with programs like Photoshop, even if the designer doesn’t have the background to transform that picture into a working model using HTML and CSS.

Graphic design and web design sound close, but they’re not the same thing and knowing the difference is important. Any artist can give you something that looks nice, but a professional web designer can make or break your online business.