I recently posted a social media blurb about how most designers and developers out there don’t use SEO basics when building sites. I got a response from one company saying, “We do SEO!”… Fine, I said… let’s see what SEO they’ve done for their own site. This is a great way to find out if a design or development company really understands and follows common SEO practices.
At first glance, the site looks amazing, great UI, good typography, good color palette, ect… If I didn’t know better, I’d call them based on their site design alone. It looks very appealing. Then I checked under the hood, basically looking at the source code for the home page. This is where the truth is told. Here’s a list of the SEO essentials that I could not find in place or done correctly on the site.
- No Title Meta
- No Description Meta
- No h1 tag
- In-line or on-page CSS styles (stopped being used years ago)
- Nothing minified (CSS, HTML, Scripts)
- No site compression
I could go on but you get the point. These are just some of the basics. If the designer or developer your looking to hire doesn’t use basic level SEO on their own site, can you trust them to SEO what they build for you? Not so much…
Anyone can see a website’s source code and look for basic SEO factors, but it’s a lot easier with a program that does it for you. Here’s a link to an easy to use and understand SEO reporting tool. Scott Hendison with SEO Automatic developed this tool and I use it all the time to show new clients the reality of their SEO situation. No Brainer Take-Away
I’m on a SEO truths rampage to help small business owners discover the truth about SEO. I’ll show you how to tell if a site is SEO by using the, “view source code” in your favorite browser in later post. For now, sign up with SEO Automatic. Their tool should give you some inside info on the designer or developer you’re looking at. Choose wisely my friends… the cost of redoing a site without SEO far exceeds the cost of building it right from the start.
P.S. – About an hour after the designer site responded to me, I noticed they had added title meta to their home page. Nice try… but it’s still only one of many factors left untouched on their site.