SEO skills are not part of web designers education. Web coders have a great talent of creating the web site customers request. But search engine optimization is a different skill set and one that is often not talked about or put into a design specification.

Here are basic SEO design guidelines I recommend to web designers in the Omaha/Council Bluffs local area:

Use CSS and not nested tables - the code is cleaner and offers web designers a straight forward way to change the look and feel of the site without having to redo table layouts.

URL names that are keyword rich (not because the URL is going to have a huge impact, but if people use the URL as a link to the site it has relevant keywords) . Use a mod-rewrite to adjust the URLs names if the web site is database driven. All those question mark values in the URL don’t always get passed along to the SEs.

Avoid Sessions - If possible, don’t make the site session oriented - at least not for the content that search engines are going to spider. Because each session makes the URL look different, this make search engine optimization real challenging when the URL keeps changing.

Values for ALT-Text - While many designers use programs (Dreamweaver) that may automagically put a place holder for alt-text, someone has to put an actual value in it. Unless you’ve provided your client a backend content management system these values have to be hard coded.

Deep Internal Linking - give the search engine spiders easy accessibility to the pages on the site. Don’t make them work hard to get to that product page that’s in a sub-sub-sub category.  If possible, make destination page only 2 or 3 hops away.

Site Map - seems obvious, but make the site map detailed and work for your client. Now this is an opinion: Sitemaps are for spiders, not for people. A link down at the bottom of the page pointing to a sitemap was not intended for humans, think about it.

These other SEO items are maybe not web designer skills, but designers can impact whether or not they get implemented:

Customized Titles - Want to rank in Google? Look at your competition for the keyword phrase in Title.

Meta Descriptions with targeted keywords. These words are not seen on the page by visitors, but they can show up in search results.

Meta Keywords - these don’t hold much of a value with Google and other search engines, but going through exercise to determine the primary keyword(s) for the page gives focus when creating the content. Don’t spam the search engines (multiple instances of the same phrase), just put the phrase once.

These on-page factors help with SEO, but when it comes to Google - the challenge is really about the off-page factors. But that’s another article.

Know your customer. Solve their problem. Make the sale.

Sounds simple enough?

But what kind of customer do you want your lead generation efforts to attract? The paying kind for sure, but what other qualities are going to make for a successful marketing campaign? How about customers who are ready to buy and have already been pre-sold.

This is not a new revelation in marketing, but for those business owners who haven’t taken the time - You now are being given permission to take 10 minutes out of your day and seriously think about if your lead generation efforts are really bringing you quality prospects that add value to your business.

• Have leads become prospects before they speak to a sales rep?
• Have prospects already educated themselves about the advantages of your product or service?
• Are prospects ready to buy when they speak to a sales associate or visit an order page?

Having a system in place that produces these high quality prospects can be the difference in making a plan for growth or just making payroll.

The Internet allows businesses (small, medium, large, and super-size?) to leverage technology creating a 24 hour lead generation machine that starts the sales process from the first contact. This allows impersonal technology to do the heavy lifting of mining those quality prospects that turn into paying customers.

The most basic technology to perform this task is - email. Contrary to many opinions, email is far from dead as a lead generation technique. Don’t believe it? How many business related emails did you read today? How many had some kind of offer in them?

The up-front costs of putting this lead generation strategy in place are:

• Creating an email follow up series
• Setting up an autoresponder service
• Adding an opt-in form to a web page

Yes, this is a simplified list - but these are the basic costs. Costs that if are managed well bring exactly the kind of prospects you want: pre-sold leads that become paying customers.

To make lead generation systematic, eventually there should be predictable results - a target ROI that can be consistently achieved. Attracting the right kind of leads will produce these results. The challenge is dedicating resources to work through the initial start up phase and get the system in place.

I’ve had several clients truly grasp this idea, but then don’t dedicate the resources to make it produce the results they’re hunting for. Usually, it’s coming up with the follow up emails. If someone in-house is not going to have ownership of it, out source it to a copy writer and move on.

And when the ROI is predictable, it just keeps paying off.

Visitor traffic is the life blood of any web site - knowing the average revenue each visitor produces is the business intelligence that separates a profitable web site from the dot-bomb catastrophe that happened years ago. Yet many businesses do not dedicate resources to determining this value.

Just because a web site is does not have a shopping cart and items available for purchase does not mean a visitor value is non-existent. If time has been taken to clarify what the call to action for a web page, then a value can be associated with the cost for accomplishing the action. The challenge for most small business owners is actually taking the time to mine the data and come up with the value.

For example: Web sites used for lead generation often capture a name and email address of a qualified visitor. If your business were to buy email leads, you would have a cost per lead. For discussion, let’s consider a simple e-commerce site that allows visitors to make a purchase:

• For every 100 visitors, 3 make purchases
• Those 3 purchases average a $50 per sale
• Of that $50, $15 is profit (that’s $45 profit per 100 visitors)
• The average value per visitor is $45/100 or $0.45

That means the business can spend an average of $0.44 to attract one new visitor, and still make a profit. (Barely a profit, but still a enough to cover the bills and have $0.01 left over). That’s a simplistic example with all the business costs being known for what really is considered a “profit” for each sale.

And it would only make sense to keep attracting new visitors with marketing dollars if they converted into profitable customers with an acceptable return on investment. Otherwise, it’s driving the business into the poor house. That was the problem with the dot-bomb euphoria, no one was counting the marketing costs and verifying there was an acceptable ROI. Companies burned through their investor’s cash and closed shop.

With Google analytics or other tools, the value per visitor can at least be estimated. Otherwise, the online marketing budget becomes this big question mark - is it working or not? Does anyone in-house know? Should the marketing dollars be spent somewhere else?

For business owners who don’t want to get into the details, get with someone you trust to help you out. Don’t let your marketing dollars go to waste, make your online resources increase your bottom line.