Optimization 101:
Beginning A Project

So you've read everything there is to read about search engine optimization, right? Or maybe not. Maybe it looks pretty easy; maybe it looks way too hard. Maybe it looks confusing; maybe it's not.

Truthfully, it's all of those things to different people. But it's easily one thing to everyone; time consuming, especially if you're going to do it right. We'd like to detail a project for you, telling you what was involved in putting it all together, so you'll get an idea of the kind of time it can take to do something like it.

For some of the things we're going to tell you, there will be someone out there who will say we wasted our time. Some others will say we only scratched the surface. If that's the case, let them write their own articles; this is ours.

This particular client was in a field that, luckily, we knew something about. That's not always the case, and when it's not, more time will have to be spent with the client up front to try to get a better understanding of exactly what it is they do, and what they might be trying to market. Because we knew what the client did, when we looked at the copy, or content, on his main page, we knew it didn't capture what he did. As a matter of fact, it was highly technical, industry jargon that even some people in the industry wouldn't regularly use.

We knew we were going to have to rewrite the main page, so we gave the client an assignment; yes, that's sometimes how it works. We asked the client to come up with five 3-keyword terms that people who wanted to find him would probably use. We wanted to see how the client saw himself, instead of telling him how we saw what he did.

While he was doing that, we took a look at his page on different browsers, and noticed that things didn't come close to looking the same on different browsers. His site looked perfect in IE (Internet Explorer); in Firefox and Opera, though, his fonts were coming through in many different sizes and fonts. His background graphics, the template used to create his site, weren't lining up properly either. Sometimes, the problem with using a graphic for your background instead of regular colors is that if someone resizes it, as in makes the print larger, it makes all the separate image files behind it move around, and that's what his did, only they didn't stay in any kind of format whatsoever. By the way, on IE, we did notice that when we increased the size of the fonts to its highest level the graphics experienced the same kind of separation, but at least stayed in order.

As we went through the rest of the site, we noticed misspellings of words that were part of this client's profession, that someone outside of the profession might miss; the designer should have clarified or researched the spelling of terms he didn't know, as that will only impact the perceptions other will have of the client later on. None of the pages had any terms bolded, and most of the copy was minimal at best. There were no links on any of the pages except to each page itself in the menu. The business name of the client wasn't mentioned anywhere on the copy on any of the pages, except on the contact page; having only the logo doesn't get it done.

And there wasn't any information about my client specifically; he's a sole proprietor with great credentials, but there wasn't a single thing about him on his website. That's a great selling point, especially with the kinds of fees he would charge for his services; anyone visiting his website would want to know what some of his experiences were to determine why he might be worth what he charges.

Of course we had already taken a look at the source codes, but this time we went into it further. We noticed immediately that there were no meta tags whatsoever. There are some who debate the importance of meta in today's world, but it still seems to work with search engines, as they tie in to the content on the page to highlight just what the site is all about.

The graphics that made up the site were a series of multiple pictures of pre-determined sizes; that's why they formatted different on different browsers. This is done to help them load quicker when visitors come to the page, and offers a unique look to some websites. None of them had alt tags in them, which helps to tell people what the business is all about. This is also debated as to whether it's important for SEO or not, but it helps because some people have their browsers set to not load pictures. What happens is they get these empty boxes instead. If you put something into those alt tags, those people will see the descriptions of whatever you put in, and in those circumstances, it can't hurt to have that little bit of extra advertising.

The site was also using a combination of CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) and HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language), which we like, but it wasn't consistent in its placement on each page, which possibly accounted for the changing font sizes when switching between browsers. A truth is that at least 70% of all Windows users use IE, but if you're in business you can't afford to make that assumption. We wanted to try to simplify the coding somewhat, because we've learned that the simpler the coding is, the better it works across different browsers.

This article is continued under "Completing The Project".

© SEO Xcellence, 2007