SEO | Why SEO’s Have A Job?

Why SEO’s Have A Job?

May 22, 2008 By: Justin | 2 comments

A lot of people think that SEO is spam or is useless. Many people are in the mindset that SEO is simply keywords and meta tags. Well, if you’re reading this blog, you should know that it’s much much more. Lots of people also say that a quality web designer shouldn’t need an SEO. This is almost true (in terms of on site, but not link building). The truth is though, there are a lot of designers who don’t have a clue what they’re doing in terms of SEO (or design).

Today I was browsing Facebook and looked at the Nashville Marketplace for Nashville Web Designers. Well I came across a posting by a girl named Kate Hall. She is a graphic design major at MTSU and markets herself as a designer and small web site designer. Naturally I went to go check out her site. And wow… Ok, I’m not trying to be an jerk against this girl, but I felt that its a prime example of why SEO’s are needed. Businesses are hiring designers like this to build and promote their site, and then wonder why they go nowhere.

Ok, so here is a link to her site: www.katehall.net

I didn’t anchor her site on purpose. THE SITE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A TITLE.

Seriously… look, no title. Who taught this girl how to design a site? If that alone doesn’t convince you of the poor quality of this site design, allow me to future explain why this site is in dire need of SEO.

SEO Problems

  • No Title! (Googlebot asks “what is this site about”)
  • No Robots.txt
  • No preferred domain (www or no www) (there two versions of the site)
  • Lack of ALT attribute on images (I hope you’re not bling… oh wait, googlebot is)
  • Image navigation with no ALT attributes (blind people can’t navigate)
  • Large amount of site information contained in images (googlebot can’t see pictures)
  • Dirty Coding (its 2008… we’ve had coding standards for a while now)
  • Lots of Tables (divs + css please?)
  • No text navigation or sitemap for accessibility

Some of these aren’t just SEO problems, but serious DESIGN issues. It really makes me worry about the quality of the design programs at MTSU and makes me question the significance in getting a web focused degree here in Tennessee (other than having the paper to hang on the wall). I am a self taught designer. I’ve never taken a class in my life (like many web designers and SEO’s). I’ve been able to out web design this girl since I was 14. You can learn better design through reading blogs online, part time.

[Take a look at her code. She put the design together using Dreamweaver and didn't even rename the styles from the default "style1", "style2", etc]

It is surprising how often I run across designers with sites like this. There are so many “photoshop users” who like to slap on the title of “web designer”. Not all web designers are created equal. That’s why designers with a focus on clean coding and SEO will design sites that are more successful by huge margins. This is why the future of SEO is not dead. Universities are still pumping out “web designers” who are not up on current design standards and don’t practice basic SEO.

[end rant]

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Comments

2 Comments »

Comment by Dave Subscribed to comments via email
2008-07-16 05:40:12

How do you set the preferred domain (www. or no http://www.)? I’m bored right now just reading through all your posts - great stuff man.

Dave

Reply to this comment
Comment by Justin
2008-07-17 04:49:07

I’ll make a post about this. You can do it with .htaccess or use a plugin if you have wordpress.

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