This afternoon I have the privilege of interviewing a web design firm for a fairly large project. I'm currently in discussions with a company to become the COO of a nicely funded semi-startup, and unfortunately the owners of the firm have already selected a web design firm (thankfully I'm not bound to keep them in any way). As one of the final steps before I take this role, in which I would be responsible for just about everything from the site to the office wall colors, I asked to talk to this firm myself to make sure that I feel comfortable with them and their abilities. I have a feeling that they may have "buzzworded" their way into the gig by talking to these owners who are not extremely technically experienced. My experience so far may help those of you that have web design or SEO firms to avoid the same mistakes.
In my initial research into the background of the company, I simply visited their website hoping to find a) the quality that they put into their own site, and b) the quality that they put into their client portfolio sites. I get the feeling after looking at both options that I will likely not be retaining their services. The business that I am going to be responsible for will rely heavily on SEO and SEM initially while establishing a community within a certain industry. The site will contain information that does not currently exist elsewhere--lots of potential! So, you can see that I will be looking for some advanced and detailed SEO techniques being used by this firm, as well as some Web 2.0 functionality. I was told by the owners that this company claimed that they specialize in just that. Guess I would be in luck! Here is what I found by looking at their own site:
- Title tag contains the name of the company - and that is it. Without actually naming them here, it was a one word company name, followed by "Technologies LLC". That is it, three words, "Blank Technologies LLC". Come on people, if you know anything about SEO, and this is the title tag of the SEO firm's site, it's probably a good idea to look elsewhere. Of course, all of the inner pages shared the same page title, which is always a good idea if you are secretive with your work and never want anyone to find your site.
- Homepage is mostly an image map, with very little text--only the street address of their location and a mailto email address (ugh, don't get me started there with the spam ramifications!) were actual text on the homepage. Alt tags were present on some of the images, but merely repeated the words displayed on the image and usually were not valuable in terms of SEO. Examples of these alt tags include "getting started" and "what do we do?" Again, it is becoming obvious that "what they do" should not be confused with SEO best practices.
- Out of curiosity, I pulled up their source code and found that my hunch about the same meta keywords and description tags being used for every page of their site was correct. When will people ever learn that laziness in these tags will get you nowhere? Now I am getting a little angry with these people. And while I was in their source code, I noticed there were no H1 tags, no CSS being used, tables everywhere, etc. I had to stop and check my calendar to make sure it wasn't 1997. Given all of this, I should have canceled my meeting for this afternoon and told the owners to drop this firm altogether, but I can't really do that just yet. So I look for something - anything - that I can build off of that they might do well and for a reason why I might think they could work. It's a stretch, but...
- They have lots of inbound links. Wow, I was amazed to see how many inbound links this company has. Over 3,000, and it is seemingly because they were able to get their clients to accept (probably unknowingly) having a link to the design firm at the bottom of every page they have. Some of these sites are .edu pages, as it looks like these guys started building sites (likely pro bono) for fraternities and sororities at colleges and universities. Genius! These sites are truthfully no more authoritative than any other site, but the domain ends in .edu and cha-ching, bonus points from the search engines!
Over 3,000 incoming links and many from .edu sites is a great start, until I see that every single inbound link uses the exact same anchor text, which is... (drumroll please) the one word name of the company. It's not even a word, for crying out loud. It's a play on words that nobody - absolutely nobody - would intentionally type into a search engine. But if you do (and as I did), you'll see that they have complete domination in the SERPs for their made-up business name. It's painful to me at this point to see that this company is that close to really being big and yet they have no clue what they are doing. It's like stuffing money under your mattress. Probably safe, but you are sitting on an asset and getting absolutely nothing for it.
Looking through their client list / portfolio on their site made me even more depressed. No H1 tags on any of them. No keyword based title tags, no site maps to be found, no meta tags at all on some of them, no directory (DMOZ, etc.) listings, no ability to find these sites using big G even when searching for the company name, and sometimes for the domain name!
So, two hours from now I meet with this company, and I am still looking for something positive to focus on. I didn't even touch on the web development side of things, but since I'm looking to build a site in 2007 and not 1997, I don't think they will be able to relate there, either. I'm expecting... "Valid XHTML? Don't you mean DHTML? Sure, we can do that, I think." Anyway, to anyone out there that is trying to make a living in these fields, please make sure that your own house is in order first. You may get by buzzwording your way into some business every now and then, but if someone that knows what they are talking about ever interviews you, you could be in for a long day.
Before I take off, one final tip from this experience - if you own a web design / SEO firm and you aren't actually good at what you are doing (and I've just discussed one that qualifies), you may not want to put a portfolio of your "work" available on your website. For interested competitors, you are providing them with a lead list as well as a "Why your current firm sucks" presentation. Heck, this might be its own blog topic someday soon, but for now, it's off to interview this firm... ugh.
*Note from Rebecca*: Though this post is over a week old, it got a lot of positive attention from our YOUmoz community, so I thought I'd put it on the main blog for more discussion.
SEO Columbus,
Great case study on evaluating your current consultants. If you weren't the new guy in the company would you have just cancelled the meeting and given them the old heeve hoe?
Thanks, I'm actually still likely to give them the heave ho. I think I can find better people from my own network of contacts to work on something like this.
Yea - You do have some good points as well,
I guess it depends on so many things like client and budget as well,
I did like your post thou !
You seem like a smart dude :)
Yea - You do have some good points as well,
I guess it depends on so many things like client and budget as well,
I did like your post thou !
You seem like a smart dude :)
Hey, thank you. I always appreciate a little healthy debate, and defending your own thoughts and ideas is always a good exercise. I'm glad you enjoyed the post.
Yes, friendly debates get those brain juices flowing and make you retrieve that well stored data in your mind sometimes,
Its always fun to debate if you can do it like adults,
But like I said great post and I had fun debating, :)
Now, back to find something else to debate about :)
Group hug?
Sure why not {{{{{[[huggs}}}}}}}}
Bur seriously , we should all do this again, It gets the ideas and thoughts out here,
See If I was just to ask "why" some people woundn't tell me , but when people heavily discuss things all kind of info flys around :)
There is a myth to my madness ...
Great post here, Columbus. It obviously stirred up a lot of discussion.
I think part of what gets people some riled up with this argument is that they look at web development and SEO as two separate things - when in reality there is a large part of SEO that means coding to certain quality standards. This part often has SEOs recoding, or even rebuilding, websites that were built without SEO in mind and just focusing on the "aesthetics."
I work with websites every day that still have headings that are actually styled with font tags right in the HTML - extraneous and messy code that not only gives no clue to the crawler about the hierarchy of information but also muddies content and makes for large page sizes.
If you're a smart developer you will raise these issues to your client in the beginning. If they are interested in search visibility there are certain things they should be aware of ahead of time. You're not looking out for your clients, or yourself for that matter, by leaving it up to them to bring up SEO after the site is published.
Thanks for the comments, fellas. I know what you mean about the "make sure your own house is in order" comment. I think that is very important, but at the same time, there is work I need to do on my own site still. That being said, I don't go out and promote my own site as my primary marketing tool. I just spun off the SEO section of my company into its own SEO Columbus brand from my main company, and I've really just started working on that site over the last two months or so. Long enough to get to the top of local keywords such as Columbus Search Marketing and near the top for others, but not long enough to do any significant damage to the more competitive global SEO related keywords.
That being said, the basic SEO fundamentals of your site need to be in order, regardless of how much time you have put into your site. If you really know SEO, you don't think twice about giving each page of your site a unique title tag, or using keyword based file structures in your navigation. Those aren't things that really take a lot of extra time. So that is where I come in with the feeling that you need to have your own house in order. Maybe you aren't quite at the top of the SERP just yet for everything you would like to be, but have the 10 basic best practices in place and at least a basic SEO strategy identified at a minimum.
As for the interview, it started off a little rough. He knew my background (former web best practices judge for the Webby's, various best practice committees, conference speaking, etc.) and actually started off by asking if I really thought SEO was worthwhile for a site. After all, he claimed, he generates his business by good publicity in local newspapers and via word of mouth. I knew this was likely the case because, quite frankly, nobody would be able to find him otherwise. He also claimed that SEO's have given web designers a bad name because "anyone can claim they know SEO". I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying something along the lines of "yea, like what I read on your site".
He gave a similar excuse in apologizing for his own company's site, saying it is outdated and he hasn't had the time or need to work on updating his own company's site. I didn't go into attack mode and ask why his client sites are pretty much the same. He was very into buzzwords, and had a folksy personality that I can tell he used to generate business, telling people that don't know any better exactly what they would want to hear. I did get a little more comfortable in finding that he would be open to work under my direction, and some of his more recent work, not identified in his site's portfolio section, did seem to be a little better in terms of functionality. It still could be a battle when I tell them that I want to lose the dynamic link structure they like to use to ensure keyword placement or limit his use of Ajax for the sake of Ajaxing. So we will see I guess. I still need to work out the logistical details of whether or not I even take on this role, but it was an interesting opportunity to interview a web development firm to see if they know what they claim to know. I'm willing to bet there are a lot of those types of firms and people out there, and as long as they are good at selling themselves and "talking the talk", they will continue to generate business.
I disagree with this part
"Out of curiosity, I pulled up their source code and found that my hunch about the same Meta keywords and description tags being used for every page of their site was correct. "
Did you ever think that there coder was just left that out?
I mean meta tags on a dynamic script will have to have a var, in the php....
So with that said , it could be just the script,
You know also another thing that you fail to see is this and I am not trying to be mean BUT your thinking has become like a robot and I used to be like that as well so its ok, but here is some info that may help you free your mind, remember is not the spoon that is bending.
You have to remember one "golden rule"
Website development is NOT all about the search engines.
If I am contracted to build a site for lets say "toys r us" or another huge company that has a heavy budget for tv, radio, and print and could care less about search traffic and there site is just a platform to direct the users to so they can make that purchase..
Would you tell toys r us that there web developer sucked because they had no unique meta tags?
Would this make there site less valuable or profitable?
The answer is NO. In fact toys r us has a great web development team and makes tons of money,
I think you really need to humble yourself more if you want to become a successful developer.
You have to remember, EVERYTHING is NOT about search engines,
There are actual humans that will bookmark a site and never use search because they found the site on tv , radio , and print and a META tag makes no difference,
I wasn't trying to be rude with this post BUT make you aware that there are many many sides to web development and its all not about what "they" tell you :)
Just remeber the spoon does not bend, and of that makes no sense, keep trying to find what it means, until you understand.
Thanks for listening !
"Would you tell toys r us that there web developer sucked because they had no unique meta tags?Would this make there site less valuable or profitable?The answer is NO. In fact toys r us has a great web development team and makes tons of money."
Sorry, but actually I think the answer would be a definite yes. It certainly would be less valuable and it actually would be less profitable. Sure, a site like Toys R Us would still generate traffic, but a site like Toys R Us also wouldn't leave off a very basic best practice of web design. And they would not have as much traffic by neglecting SEO best practices. Still a lot, don't get me wrong, but not as much.
The unfortunate thing is that this firm's clients aren't the Toys R Us' of the world, but rather the Joe Schmo Insurance company that doles out $5,000 for a website that nobody ever sees.
Unfortunately, to be successful in this field you have to think like a robot to some extent, as well as a user. Websites have to be built for search engines just as much as they are built for people, otherwise no people are ever going to see it anyway.
I appreciate the feedback.
"Websites have to be built for search engines just as much as they are built for people"
Can you explain this further please :)
Oh also ,
So what about youtube?
No meta tags there,
I think you go about building the local dentist office website is a little different approach than trying to build a YouTube.
In regards to the build sites for SE's and people, you need both to be successful. Kind of like the "if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?" question. If you have a great site and nobody finds it, is it a great site? Same thing for if you have a well optimized site that people don't want to visit. There needs to be a 50/50 balance. I built a site that provided a service to people, and that they were easily able to find. That site grew to about 3500 unique visitors / day in 12 months, and the total marketing spend for the year was about $500 for an initial PPC campaign. I just sold the site to a prominent web person (that most people here would know) for a nice price. My history of using this process has taught me over the years that I think that both sides (SE and people) need to be considered.
Not to be a jerk or anything, but....umm yes...there are.
If you use the "view source" function in your browser...and scroll down about 30 lines or so...you will find unique KW and description META's, along with a few others....for each video.
When you enter the "tags" and write the "description" for your video, you are doing YouTube's work for them. They just write some code that automatically puts that in the META data.
Hey SEO Columbus,
I enjoyed your post. Couldn't agree more with everything you said in your original post, but was a bit surprised by your follow on. Seems to me you are being too lenient with them considering all of the strong SEO talent out there. Not that you needed to be confrontational with them, however I think you'd be well served to "tell it like it is" to the prospective company you'd be working for.
The fact that these guys questioned whether SEO is valuable, apologized for their own site, etc... They just sound like a bunch of yahoo's, and even under your direction would be third rate talent at best - which means you'd be spending more time training them then would be worth the effort. Better to hire "A" talent at the outset and ensure strong results.
As to Brian's comment:
"I agree with much of what your saying with one small exception"...please make sure that your own house is in order first."
You have to remember that almost all design firms are focusing all their effort of billable clients. If they can't bill their hours to a client they are basically losing money."
I couldn't disagree more. I'm not suggesting you need a world beater site to start, but my gosh - how much time does it take to handle the fundamentals for a small company site - one day?
If you do accept the role, I'd say go with your first instincts and find some quality talent to work with.
Just a quick point, and not really in relation to the specific company you are talking about because they sound like they did EVERYTHING else wrong!
"Alt tags were present on some of the images, but merely repeated the words displayed on the image and usually were not valuable in terms of SEO. Examples of these alt tags include "getting started" and "what do we do?" "
I've got to disagree with the above. I come from an accessibility background and was designing sites in xhtml and css for this reason way before I ever got into SEO.
Using words in an image should be avoided as much as possible as it doesn't allow the user to control size etc, however if they absolutely must be used then best practice is to populate the alt tag with the exact word / phrase as shown in the image.
Yes you may lose some minuscule SEO benefit but for any disabled surfer using a screen reader you will be providing the most accurately matched experience possible.
In the example above it sounds like they are using the correct alt text (assuming that those phrases are what the images said)...however a better way would be to include more useful phrases in both the image text and the matching alt. e.g "Our Web Design Work" etc
Find an effective solution yes, but user experience should not be sacrificed for SEO and this applies as equally to a disabled surfer as any other.
Great post otherwise though, cheers!
Thanks for the comment, and I agree with you on the usability side of things. I used to perform "Bobby" work for many sites, and I know how important this is. Ideally, though, there would be ways to incorporate an alt tag that is clearly descriptive of the image displayed, and also containing a keyword of value.
Back to one of Columbus' earlier comments - paraphrasing - "Websites should be designed for optimization".
Whether a client is paying for optimization or not, there are basic SEO practices that essentially cost nothing and that should be followed regardless, if for no other reason than the fact that they demonstrate a that the designer knows what they are doing and they are looking out for the best interest of their clients.
This includes:CSS, H1, SEF urls, Descriptive and relevant title tags, alt tags, etc...
Yes, that is exactly where I was getting at that there are things you do because they are best practices, not because the client happens to be paying for the service.
And to follow up on the matter, I informed the owners of the company that I would not be able to accept the position if I were forced to keep this design firm in place. They seemed to appreciate the feedback, basically letting them know that if I'm not comfortable putting my rear on the line with this group, they shouldn't be comfortable investing the money they are planning to invest either. It looks like I will get the opportunity to put my own people in place, which is definitely going to be important so that I am not micromanaging an inexperienced group.
Good for you Columbus. Having the courage to state your mind; as long as it's done with integrity and dignity - despite any potential negative ramifications (i.e. upsetting or alienating someone), will always win out in the long run. The day I hire a "yes man" is the day my business will begin to suffer.
Good luck to you in this venture and thanks again for investing your time in the entry.
i work at a web design / seo company and we have separate teams for web design & development and seo.
some clients only want a web site and don't sign up to pay for seo. the seo team doesn't spend a lot of time doing keyword research and creating unique title tags for these clients. they may be in our online portfolio to showcase the web design and not necessarily the seo aspect.
we also have seo clients who've had great results but whose sites we did not design. we obviously don't include these sites in our online portfolio as we did not design them.
just something to keep in mind.
Thanks for the post. I agree that there are plenty of firms that do one or the other, but even if a client doesn't pay for SEO, should you design the site differently (in terms of basic SEO related best practices)? I can't imagine designing a site without H1 tags simply because the client didn't pay for SEO services. My larger issue with this firm is that they claim SEO expertise on their site, but don't display any knowledge by using any best practices on their own site. The fact they they are wasting 3,000 inbond links by mis-using the anchor text that they have created for those links tells me they haven't a clue about how even SEO works - which is fine - but don't claim expertise or that they even offer the service to begin with, because that really does water down the term for people that actually know how to build and design an optimized site.
don't get me wrong, we do design "search friendly" sites and use css and h1 tags and all that good stuff by default. we just don't spend a lot of time on keyword research, unique titles & descriptions etc. for clients not wanting or paying for our seo services.
That's been our approach, as well. Good coding practices (unless the client absolutely insists on a Flashtravanganza despite our best efforts to warn them away from it), but no keyword research, unique titles and descriptions, etc.
Good points.
We do the same - If a client has our comprehensive plans - they get development/design, analytics, hosting & marketing services - but not everyone has the resources or the knowledge (and some people are just not convinceable) to buy into that idea - so we do ala carte design work also - with good coding practices, unique content, page titles, & meta data capabilities for each page, etc.
I 100% agree with you ,
Why should you do seo, when they are paying for design
wethead, do you design your site differently by not using best practices because they do not pay for SEO? I'm not saying you incorporate keyword research and everything else necessarily if they don't want you to do that. Personally, I won't work on a site if I think it's being set up to fail by not building it properly, but I agree that doesn't always make sense for people with perhaps a lower budget in mind, although going cheap is a worse investment in the long run.
I think we aLL just do things different
The purpose of alt text is to provide a description of the image if it can't be displayed (or seen). If an image is just of text, then the alt attribute should quite rightly just contain that text.
I disagree that the alt tag needs to be verbatim. It definitely needs to be describing what is said, but can be used to describe the image as well, or improve the experience of the user using a screen reader, etc. Sometimes the text on the screen doesn't do justice to the image, and it is the users benefit to make the alt tag more descriptive. This is where keywords can be used (but certainly only where legitimate and justified). By no means am I saying to stuff your alt tags with bogus keywords.
Thats a very good summary of the use of the alt attribute - and you are right not to stuff it wit keywords, but consider the fact, if the image on the page does not relate to the topic, then is there any point in it being there? If you cant use at least one set of keywords to describe the image, then I think the image does not belong on the page...
Take for example a page about a beach holiday, which has an image of a family on the beach - you can easily make the alt: " Photo of Family enjoying their beach holiday at (insert destination)" without considering it spam.
I totally feel your pain and couldn't agree more with your assessment of this company. I started my own SEO company last year and while doing a competitive analysis I too noticed that many companies out there that claim to do SEO don't have well optimized web sites. I delayed launching my own website until it was well optimized and well designed.
Good Luck.
Your post was 14 months ago. The information made it easy to find the company you were reffering to. Both their site (No text on home page, all image) and their portfolio sites still are of the same poor quality from both a programming view or SEO.
Some people will never get it.
Practice what you preach!
It's so suprising these days when you look around at SEO firms. I rarely... rarely find a quality SEO firm that has a good design themselves.
Even many industry leaders that are legends in the SEO world have hideous designs. How can that be? How can you be on the web, practicing SEO and all other things Internet marketing since the late 90's and yet your site looks like it was designed in mspaint.
It urks me soo bad to see these SEOs charging thousands of dollars for their services and their site has no graphics and one lousy new times roman font. These firms desperately need to hire a designer to add to their arsenal. It would give them so much more credibility.
Sadly, a lot of people that are looking for design and SEO firms don't know what to look for, but I think that the good SEO firms would get so much more business if their site wasn't so dated.
I own a web dev and online marketing company and it astounds me to see how many of my competitors have sites that look like something out of 1997.
Even worse!!! I have come across 2 that dont even have websites... yes you heard me right.
When I asked why they said they are too busy servicing clients to either spend time on their own site or do one at all... Naturaly I was apathetic to guide them otherwise ;)
Thanks for the post - sascha
I agree with what you are saying for the most part. If this company is calling itself a SEO consultant, firm, whatever, they should at least be in the know regarding the basic principles/practices of SEO.
However, it seems to me that this company is trying to set itself up to be a one-stop-shop if you will. A place where all aspects of SEO, design, and dev are done. I think that people need to keep in mind that the ideas and concepts of SEO are stll "new" to a lot of these firms. I say this because I just left one in order to start my own business focusing on just the SEO consulting aspect. I am not a dev guy, and even though I work very well with designers, I am not one.
The problem I see with these one-stop-shop solution type companies is that their focus has not been on SEO until the recent past. In order to shift to s proactive SEO mindset they would have to change a lot of the ways that they do things. They would have to get away from their love of tables, and change several aspects of their current tech. A lot of these guys either just dont understand the impact that these changes would have on their business, or in the case that I was just in, do not have the budget, knowledge, or manpower to take on such a task.
Just an opinion based on my recent frustrations. I did very much enjoy your post!!!
I agree. The web is over saturated with SEO & web design companies claiming to offer services that just don't cut it - this can be quickly identified by just glacing at their site...
"Check Out Our Clients With Number One Rankings!"
Some really long keypharse that will drive absolutely no traffic!!!!
No.1 On Goooogle !!!!!
Another thing I have come across was when I contacting some selected web design companies, asking them if they would like to offer SEO to their clients and getting a reply like:
All sites we build are already optimised..
Really?
They come with the links already built? They must know something I don't! (usually upon viewing their clients source code the optimisation consisted of stuffing a keywords meta tag)
Awesome.
I agree with much of what your saying with one small exception"...please make sure that your own house is in order first."
You have to remember that almost all design firms are focusing all their effort of billable clients. If they can't bill their hours to a client they are basically losing money.
Some of the largest and best known firms in the world have sites not utilizing the most recent techonolgies including xhtml. I wouldn't write off a firm based on the development of their own site.
I completly agree with your assesment of their clients/portfolio page though. This is the best area to see what a firm is capabile of and to see the type of results you can expect to get.
I should also mention that i work for an incredibly large design firm as a web producer in the marketing department. My company relizes the importance of putting your best foot forward, which is why they have me -- the overhead, non revenue generating web producer.
Brian,
I would disagree.
They putting themselves out there as an SEO/Design Firm.
Shouldn't best practices be implemented at home first? Don't they have friends, or at least some enemies in the SEO/Design industry who have pointed out their weaknesses?
Do they even read SEO blogs?
Either their weaknesses have been pointed out/read about, or they are completely ignorant of the state of internet business in general.
If they have ignored the advice of others, then they are stubborn, and will be hard to deal with. If they are ignorant, then they have chosen that path, and will be stubborn, and hard to deal with.
Being a part of this community has changed the way I look at how other people view my site. Consequently, I have to step up my game.
You would think that they would do the same.
A mapped image for a website is inexcusable.
As to focusing on billable hours, that's all fine and good, if you are not deceiving the customer.
Please take it easy on them, Columbus.
your assesment of their clients/portfolio page ... is the best area to see what a firm is capabile of and to see the type of results you can expect to get.
Absolutely, it's all in your clients. Many high qualiity firms I know haven't had time to update their own website in years. They produce top quality websites, and get so much business that their own site falls by the wayside.
I think this relates to shoemakers and children.
I personally don't see any problem with designs firms who also throw in SEO. There are web hosting firms that claim they do "SEO" (Network Solutions!) - so why not design firms?
SEO is a specialized service - but design firms, web dev firms with crappy CMS, and web hosting firms know that's the ULTIMATE service - so they try to get a piece of the pie.
But as with all things, you get what you pay for. If you want cheap, you get cheap results.
I hear people talk about making money and getting rich. Well, are you willing to put in 60-80 hours a week to make your dreams come true? Are you willing to get 4-5 hous of sleep per night, give up all semblance of a life, to make that 1 determined dream come true? If not, then get a job and collect a paycheck.
Same thing with SEO. Plenty of people claim they want SEO - but when confronted with the costs of a truly effective SEO solution, they baulk. So they turn to a designer, web hosting company or other who will tell them a price they like. They buy it - has no effect, then they cry about it.
These design/seo firms serve a purpose - and if they are dumb enough to display their clients - even better for companies like mine.
Ultimately, SEO is a service. I've learned that you can be fired from pro bono jobs if you don't deliver on service.
PT Barnum is quoted for "there's a fool born every minute." And that is true - these guys prey on the fools. And the fools let themselves be preyed on. Very symbiotic. Fortunately, real SEOs are higher up on the food chain.