As an SEO, I can say that in theory website design should include a good bit of input from SEO people. SEO should be part of the entire design process, included along side items like database design, UI design, and architecture choice.
I’d say that in the majority of new websites, especially for companies of any size, this is the case. SEO has earned a spot at the table now that the business drivers realize the days of “if you build it they will come” never really existed. For smaller businesses and business owners who really don’t “get” the web, the sad fact is that usually they will be sold a bill of goods that does not deliver on their wildest imagination.
I can say with great certainty, that as an SEO company in Richmond Virginia, we see more clients who have a website and absolutely no SEO plan than vice-versa. Usually by the time we get the call, the business owner has read about this stuff called search engine optimization and knows that people call it SEO, but other than that they have no clue what to do.
We also get a fair number of client contacts with business owners who have heard of pay per click, and might even know it as search engine marketing or SEM, but again, are at a loss for how to really utilize it.
As a company who also provides website design and development,Three Stone Media LLC obviously includes SEO in our most initial of conversations. Almost all of our competition in the Richmond market does as well. If you are looking in to building a website for your business, or even are looking to do a site redesign, make sure that your development company includes SEO as a topic of discussion from day one and as a major factor in the design.
Retrofitting code and UI for SEO after the fact is costly and can be an arduous process. Of course, we always welcome work like this! 
Following a tweet that I ran across and digging a few links, I found one of the new style search engines. SearchMe presents a flash based gui that upon searching, allows you to scroll through lists of textual results while viewing quasi-graphical representations of the target pages. My first thoughts as an SEO were of course where am I ranked! Kind of vain, but very typical of SEOs.
After a couple initial searches for my SEO clients, I actually did some hands on results browsing. My thoughts of SearchMe are:
- The pages are busy. As I look at the pages, I don’t know that this is a bad thing, just different. As we have grown accustomed to the stereotypical search results page of Google, Yahoo, etc, I think we get used to the paradigm of text lists.
- My mouse scroller would not work on the lists. Dumb you say? Of course, but as a user I’ve grown accustomed to being able to scroll on the page by rolling the little rolled on top of the mouse. Convenience, UI, generally accepted user interface. I expect that they will tweak for something like this down the road (if there is a down the road).
- Clicking on a listing in the text list immediately loads the quasi-graphical page view of the search result. A big plus on the cool meter.
- Mouse over the listing and you get a text ad that pops on the bottom of the result. I guess they need a way to monitize their data, so I’ll not pass judgement yet as long as the ads are relevant. If the ads turn spammy, then I’m not so sure I want them associated with my content.
- Click on the magnifying glass, and you can zoom in on portions of the target page. Big plus on the cool meter.
- I clicked on a results page for a site that we do SEO on. I just want to see if the referer information will be helpful. To my dismay, All I get for the referrer is “http://www.searchme.com”. Now, that is not very helpful for an SEO. We need referer to keep up with which keywords are being searched.
I realize that SearchMe is still in beta. I was more interested in getting an initial read on it. From a UI perspective, I am not sure that all the bells and whistles are something I like. I am very much a utilitarian searcher – give me data in a very easily navigated format. I can see though where others might prefer it. Ultimately, as all search engines, they will be judged based on the quality of data they provide. For the few keyword searches I ran, the results were different than Google’s, but not to such an extreme that I would be concerned. As you dig in to more competitive terms though the results may vary significantly.
[EDIT: When I went to test this out this morning, Januay 27, 2010, the search is down and they are offering to sell their intellectual property. I guess this answers the question of how people don't like their search!]
Pretty much everyone who keeps a pulse on the SEO community has heard of, read, commented on, or created a blog post in response to John C. Dvorak’s recent post on the PC Magazine site about SEO Fiascoes. For those who have not heard, he basically bashes a mainstay of many years in the SEO industry — long URLs. As the story goes he got some SEO advice from someone who supposedly knows what they are talking about gave him a comment about using long url’s, which he interpreted to mean that his traffic would rise if implemented. Or so his story plays out in his post.
Two things come to mind for me… one, he knows nothing about long URLs, how they came in to vogue, or what they were intended to accomplish. Secondly, to the SEO inclined he comes off as an idiot in a bully pulpit preaching about something he has limited knowledge of.
With regards to long URLs, they were not originally implemented as keyword laden URLs. What has morphed in to long URLs originally was an idea to accomodate the search engine spiders apparent inability to spider dynamic URLs.
Dynamic URL
http://www.threestonemedia.com/index.php?page=form&id=1 (this is a contrived example)
Long URL Equivalent
http://www.threestonemedia.com/contact-us (contrived again)
Back in “the day”, a website owner may have had mediocre luck in getting the dynamic URL form indexed as it was often the case that search engines did not spider/index dynamic URLs extensively. By converting a URL to a “long URL” the search engine spiders would find the page, spider it, and if it had any quality what so ever it would be indexed. Our first implementation of this type of URL conversion resulted in a site increasing from under 100 indexed pages to over 3000 indexed pages in a matter of 2 weeks.
In the current search engine world, the issues around spidering dynamic URLs has supposedly been addressed. Although if it was truly addressed, would the big 3 have come out with the new canonical URL tag recently? It really does not matter though. Just as old wives tales go, when non-SEO webmasters took tales of how to increase indexed pages and rankings, the general mantra has become – “throw a long URL on it and your rankings will increase”. This is surely bogus as search results are often not completely driven by any on SEO trick you can implement.
Back to Dvorak, my first thought was that he is an idiot (and I am not completely backing off that assumption) for presenting his opinion as an expert opinion on a subject which is outside of his skillset. However, the more I ponder his comments and the immediate backlash the more I think his SEO expert may really have been teaching him the art of link-baiting. His post has generated tons of links for PC Magazine (including mine — which are nofollowed – HA!). He has rejuvenated a sliding image, especially among those who view SEO as voo-doo. He might even have made himself relevant again.
I don’t think Dvorak would have thought this up of his own accord. I do however think that his SEO “maven” may have tossed out the idea as something to play with.