Step Wise SEO

Graphic designers are those creative souls responsible for the look and feel of your website.

In a larger organization, style developers create the style guides that all of the other web page creators have to follow.

In a smaller company, you may be dealing with just a few designers or even an individual who is a combination of graphic designer and web developer.

The graphics portion of the SEO team is responsible for setting up search engine-friendly standards in the style guide, if there is one;

soliciting input from the SEO team leader during site updates; and, because SEO has a way of dropping off the radar after a while, making sure that the standards are mandatory and ongoing.

If you’re on your own, you won’t have anyone else to persuade. But if you’re assembling an SEO team that includes Graphics, you’ve got some convincing to do!

You’ll have the best chance at success with this department if you include the following steps:

• Recognize the value of the work that the Graphics department does.

• Educate about graphics-related SEO skills.

• Formalize your agreements. Let’s look at these three steps in depth.

Value Graphics
First, recognize the importance of what your designers do. Like the IT department, graphic designers often feel that their efforts are undervalued.

The “look” of a site is not just an aside. In a visual medium, the look is the fundamental substance of your visitors’ experience.

And it’s not just a cosmetic thing-your designers are responsible for usability factors as well.

Your organization may have the benefit of user testing, or the designs may be created in a more seat-of-the-pants fashion. Either way, we can tell you this right now:

Designers want you to let them be the designers.

A conflict between SEO and graphic designers exists because SEO is, at least in part, optimizing the website for a nonhuman visitor (a search engine robot), while deigners are entirely focused on the human user experience.

As the ambassador of SEO, your job is to find common ground. Sit down with the leadership – the department head, the style guide developer, the senior designer,

or whoever happens to have the website graphic files on their computer – and figure out how you can make SEO work for everybody.

A website that nobody can find is worthless, but you certenly don’t want a site that people immediately leave because the design doesn’t speak to them. So, you must recognize and acknowledge this fact:

The human audience will always be the most important.

Make a commitment to the graphics department that you will never sacrifice the human user experience for SEO.

Educate and Empower
It’s important to educate your designers about the reasoning behind your SEO proposals.
Give them a quick course on the graphics-related factors.

Again, it’s best not to overwhelm with too many details, so you should limit your explanations to elements that you are looking to change.

Is your designer attached to a JavaScript pull-down navigation? Show how most search engines won’t follow those links.

Stuck on big graphic headlines? Tell them how to get a peek at your website the way that search engine spiders see-or, more appropriate, don’t see-these elements. Show this to your designers for a shocker!

Naturally, there may be too many changes to make in one fell swoop. Go for the big-ticket items first-for example, getting rid of frames, wrapping Flash elements in robot-friendly HTML pages, replacing major graphic headlines with HTML text, and creating a lower-priority list for less significant SEO changes. In other words, do this:

Start with big changes for quicker tangible results.

After you have some results to show from the first pass, you’ll have great ammunition for a second pass.

Don’t be drawn in by the myth that everything that benefits SEO will be detrimental to the design and that you have to choose between a good-looking site that nobody can find and an ugly site with tons of traffic.

Many of your SEO improvements, such as adding IMG ALT tags to graphics, will have no ill effect on the design.

And there are some, like replacing outdated font tags with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), that your designers may have been wanting to do anyway. But most important, if your designers are able to internalize SEO factors, future designs will have a way of coming out more search-engine friendly.

Make It Official
If your organization uses a web style guide, you have a great head start. Because for SEO, rules are good!

It will give your SEO guidelines longevity-so that your standards are followed not just once, but every time a new page is created.

And it will benefit you when, six months down the road, you’re handing off SEO reviews to someone else or you’ve forgotten what you’d planned at the outset.

What if there’s no style guide, just one or two designers putting together pages eased on what feels cool at the moment?

You’ll need some way to formalize your agreements and give them some long-term viability. If you can’t get it in writing, a handshake will do.

Set up a system for your designers to run edits by you in the future. At the very least, be sure that you’re informed of major site edits so that you can coordinate a site review for SEO.

What do you do to have the best chance at success with these folks (graphic designers)

Why do you think a conflict between a graphic designers and SEO exist?