What Do You Pay an SEO Designer?

Here’s a spin on the “what do you feed a 500-lb. gorilla?” joke…

Q: What do you pay a designer who builds Search Engine Optimized sites?

A: Whatever he wants!!

That’s because a designer/web developer whose coding, site hierarchy and other practices are search engine optimized is just that rare - and just that important to your success getting found online.

Search engine-friendy design is one of the 10 Commandments of SEO, as per this BrowserTech blog edict:

“A search and visitor friendly design is a must for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough for repeat visits by search engines and potential customers. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLs and avoid those long URLs with query strings.”

Yup, but there’s a whole lot more to SEO-friendly design than URLs - and it’s pretty darn technical stuff. Things like:

  • Good code-to-content ratio (no ‘code bloat’)
  • Clean HTML
  • Hierarchical design
  • No hacking
  • CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]-controlled elements
  • Compliant with World Wide Web Consortium standards

Our designers were trained by the best in SEO

Most of the team of immensely talented web designers at writingSEO was trained at the same Internet publishing company as I was - a place where SEO was ingrained into our everyday practice.

One of our designers, C.K., sums up the balancing act he walks between designing pages that get ranked well in search engines and feature the interactive, audio/visual bells and whistles that people expect today:

Designs can be as fancy as they want, and there is no stipulation that states that a graphically or multimedia-saturated site cannot rank as high as any other text-based CSS-only site. It’s all about content accessibility and SEO-driven content…

There you have it, SEO writing and design: more than just a pretty face… a pretty face that people actually get a chance to see!

5 comments ↓

#1 My Time is Your Money | WritingSEO on 06.24.08 at 7:27 pm

[...] found online; can you go back in and change the site so it meets SEO requirements?” [Read: restructure/redesign, conduct keyword research, rewrite all the [...]

#2 WritingSEO » Social Media, I’d Like to Introduce You to SEO on 07.10.08 at 3:08 pm

[...] it was too little info on SEO - and the site design we did of their group blog was not SEO-compatible and the content not search engine optimized. Link [...]

#3 WritingSEO » Write it Right the First Time on 08.07.08 at 2:31 am

[...] spend their marketing dollars on as many aspects of SEO and site usability as possible, including search-compatible design, link building efforts, social media optimization, and ongoing [...]

#4 Remember George Costanza’s Dream Job? | WritingSEO on 08.16.08 at 7:04 am

[...] own experience indicates that lots of companies are making fatal errors when choosing a designer based on bells and whistles - Flash, pretty colors, modern layout - instead of examining the [...]

#5 Local Business Search Results in Google | WritingSEO on 11.02.08 at 6:29 am

[...] break into that local business cluster (and stay there) - using ethical practices, great writing, SEO design, appropriate metacontent, video/image optimization and more to keep Google [...]

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