Web Designer as SEO

A recent article in a guerrillaconsulting.com newsletter suggests that many web design pros will soon be faced, if not already, with the challenge of re-creating or designing sites for SEO. This is a very interesting concept.

If you design it... will they come?

While many companies see search as a major strategy in gaining visibility for their products or services, often times organic search takes place in a post-architecture or post-launch site analysis. A company will introduce a new web site with a wait-and-see approach... only to see spotty traffic as a result.

Does form follow function?

At what point in the development process do we introduce organic key phrase targeting, coding techniques or site architecture? The farther ahead in the planning process design and SEO are taken into consideration, the better the results. You can't always predict the where (page position) and the who (clicks) in organic search, but with some best practices in mind, you can design a site that will have a good chance of achieving both.

Blog Promotion Utility

Found this nice little blog chicklet creator tool to help web designers and web masters easily add aggregate service links to their blog. A handy tool that works well with Blogger and a few other blogging services.

Live.com Beta Breathes Some Life into MSN Search

Lack of innovation and increasing competition from Google and others, have lead Microsoft to release Windows Live Beta. This new version of MSN offers many of the same features you might find as an MSN member, but with a much cleaner interface design and some "desktop widget-like" browserware. Many of the services on Live.com interact with XML to pull everything from email and weather to classified ad listings, such as the ones in Live.com Beta Expo... and yes ... more maps.

Much of Live.com technology can be found on other web portals or other sites, but you have to give Microsoft some credit for taking a step in the right direction with Live.com. Personalized web search and site customization are definitely where the internet is headed. Only time will tell if Live is the answer to Microsoft's software innovation woes and search engine marketing miscues.

SEO and Web Design Templates

Found an interesting article on SEO that suggests a number of companies are lagging in the area of web marketing.

"More than 80 percent said they planned to increase investment in the web over the coming year, but most rated their firms' collective knowledge of the latest web marketing trends and technologies as poor." (Web Trends Survey of 250 Marketing Executives)

This brings to mind something that most companies do not consider when building a web site or hiring a site design agency. Most web site template designs or one size fits all web sites are not built around a companies search needs. Many companies are now realizing that they must come up with a strategy, possibly only weeks after designing or re-designing their site.

How a web site is structured, including code, links and overall design, has a direct impact on where the site appears within search results. Template web site designs rarely take into consideration the companies target market or keywords, nor are they structured link wise, code wise or content wise to drive the most traffic to their respective services. Even some of the best creative agencies lack many of the necessary best practices when it comes to designing sites for search. Regardless of your industry, product or service... having a web strategy is essential for growing business now and in the future.

Lavada Sites Web Design

Still working through some bugs on a recent project, LavadaSites.com. The site is designed to feature creative and user friendly sites. Many of the sites featured on Lavada have truly unique user experiences. Some of the sites featured are not household names, yet. They tend to cater to a niche audience that is looking for hard to find, unique gifts or products. The goal of this project is to provide a common area and community based around all of the sites collected by or partnered with at LavadaSites.com