Web Toastie

OK it may be a bit of a blanket statement, but it seems a lot of web designers are trying their hand at SEO, and doing it badly. Many tips on the Internet encourage web designers to begin the optimisation process from the ground up, and this can be a great process… if done correctly. I’ve decided to list a couple of SEO techniques that I’ve come across over the last few months. These techniques have been implemented by web designers as part of a search engine optimisation service on client websites.

Some notable ‘SEO’ techniques from web designers:

Hidden Text

Ah yes, the classic black-hat SEO technique. Hidden text is a seemingly common trick amongst some web designers, as they try to put optimisation in place while maintaining the aesthetics of a website. Hidden text comes in quite a few different forms, such as same colour text / same colour background, positioning text so it is a 1000 pixels out of view, or having a little sneaky java button that hides the text from the user.

To check to see whether a website has any hidden text, always check the source code.

Website Structure

The structure of a website isn’t necessary a case of a web designer trying to do SEO, but a badly designed site can actually hamper any optimisation quite significantly. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, and this can be very true for people with a limited knowledge of search engine optimisation. Examples of bad structural decisions include: universal meta/title tag use and Flash or frameset websites (to name a few).

When a bad website structure is in place, it can lead to various limitations which may effect search engine rankings.

Link Building

I use the term ‘link building’ loosely, as I’ve recently come across some pretty awful attempts by web designers to aquire links for a website. Some interesting link building attempts include:

• Having several hidden links pages on a clients website. These link pages included web addresses to a whole list of other clients that the company had done work for.
• Adding a website to every possible directory and submission site under the sun, including warez, porn and other completely unrelated websites.

If you are going to do link building, don’t be lazy and don’t try to fool the search engines.

Should Web Designers Really Stop Doing SEO?

Well no, not if it is done properly. I appreciate that it is a small portion of the web design community that is causing problems for SEO companies (and client websites, of course), but the problems seem to be cropping up more often. I’m not trying to say I’m an SEO guru (far from it), but not everyone should presume they can do SEO.

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