Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines?
Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

DESIGN CAN’T BE IGNORED

If you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you correctly understand some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought-If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that’s not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB

that’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you’re offering.

Sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, “pumpkin bread recipe.”

From a design standpoint “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra” code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It won’t read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking

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It is important to recognise that ‘marketing’ is not a fixed process, but changes with the times. As much as ancient Mesopotamian business people had no access to the desktop published print materials or television advertising that we may think of in relation to traditional marketing, it is also true that those who developed the industry had no knowledge of or access to the World Wide Web.

The Internet has provided an additional marketing ‘channel’ that gives modern businesses fantastic edge which is unique to today’s world and that of future generations. Online marketing is cost effective and expedient, with built in tracking mechanisms and the ability to target key marketing demographics while also extracting valuable psychographic data.

Online versus traditional marketing
Traditional marketing had access to a number of mass communication channels: point of sale; printed materials such as flyers and brochure-ware; newspapers and magazines, including trade press and specialty publications; television and radio being some of the primary modes utilised. Advertising and Communications agencies developed to service a growing need throughout the twentieth century for quality advice, strategy and media buying power.

Traditional marketing of the past used primarily these main channels to get the message out about the features and benefits as well as brand identity of a product, service or organisation. As the industry became increasingly complex, traditional marketing evolved to a more holistic outlook which touted integrated marketing communications as a means of keeping all elements on the same page, without the unfortunate drift that could so easily be allowed to happen. In instances which lacked this cohesion, marketers began to notice that they did not receive the full impact of campaign, with lost and wasted expenditure and crossed-purposes damaging their efforts.

As awareness of the power of consistency grew, other sophisticated marketing savvy began to develop within the industry. New ideas about the best use of funds and opportunities to more finely target a campaign to key customer groups became a focus in opposition to a broad scattergun attempt to reach the few via the many.
Television could be tracked by ratings, print publications by readership and circulation figures; but nothing compared to the detail which would become available through the use of the Internet.
The power of the Internet: a marketer’s dream
The Internet, and digital communications in general (including hand-held personal communications devices and mobile telephone technologies) opened up a whole new age of marketing; allowing demographic and psychographic analysis with far greater accuracy than before at a lower cost. More than this, however, new media technologies invited the marketing message into the consumer’s world in an active and dynamic way. No longer were consumers passive receivers of marketing messages: through the technology, marketers could engage the consumer in a direct interaction.
It is easier to understand the value of new media communications through a short example. Jennifer runs a floral boutique and wants to get the message out that she has recently rebranded her business and now offers a hamper service in addition to floral arrangement. In the past, when she needed to broadly communicate to the public, she would place an advertisement in a major metropolitan paper in her city. She would always want her ad to stand out, so she would pay extra for placement ‘above the fold’ and in a right hand side position, and if she couldn’t stretch the budget to full colour she fell back on spot colour as a better alternative to mono (black and white).
Jennifer had always read that consistency was key and felt that if an ad was to run at all, it needed to be given at least a few weeks to do its work. The best value in this case was to buy a package over a number of weeks. This is a broad approach, scattering marketing dollars across a wide cross-section in order to hopefully reach a handful of the right type of predisposed customer.
Having spent a major chunk of her slim marketing budget, Jennifer wanted to have a way of tracking the interest her advertisement generated and the success level regarding retention of message. To this end, she had incorporated a competition whereby the entrant completed a short answer incorporating the name of the business, which would then be posted in for ‘judging’. A huge administrative burden was one result, but the upside was that Jennifer could tell to a limited extent what proportion of readers had received her message and digested the brand name and value proposition.
Contrasting this experience with the online marketing opportunities presented by the advent of digital communications, Jennifer now has many more alternatives for her campaign which all told come in at a much lower cost threshold and allow her to pick and choose who she targets for the campaign.

Marketing is an industry that evolved according to needs associated with the growth of capitalism and attracting and retaining business for one’s commercial endeavours. While the twentieth century gave it a name, the practice of marketing is much older, dating back at least to the ancient bazaars of Mesopotamia.

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