• Cheap Website Design Can Turn Around & Bite You! •
• A True Client Story •

Yesterday was a very satisfying day for me professionally. Damian and I provided a beautiful new (and properly SEO’d) website to yet another newbie to the world of online marketing. Now my client, whom I’ll refer to as “Jennie”, can start to really grow her work-at-home business.

I am always excited when I get a new client, especially one who has never marketed their products or services online before. I know how excited I was the first time I viewed my first website on the World Wide Web! It was an awesome experience. I enjoy sharing in that same excitement with my clients when they finally see their website uploaded and live on the internet!

But there’s more to this post than me gushing over how great I feel, and how happy my client is with her new website design.

It Didn’t Start Out All Rosy and Wonderful For Her

Jennie was referred to me about eight months ago by another very satisfied client. She and I talked about what is entailed to get a new website up and running; what it takes to get good rankings in the search engines; what she needs to know about maintaining the website; and of course, how much the website design and search engine optimization services would cost her.

I gladly offer a complimentary 30-minute consultation to prospective clients. I can make a quick assessment of your website’s design and search engine optimization status, or discuss what is involved to get your first website up and running.

Damian and I are very fair and quite reasonable in our design and SEO fees. We pride ourselves on over delivering  all aspects of our services. In our minds, we proposed a very fair price to Jennie for a “simple” yet user friendly and 100% SEO friendly website design.

“OK, Claudia … Let Me Think About That …”

If someone has never had a website before, and really has not done much investigation into the price points and fees that are being quoted for web design and SEO services, it is obviously quite hard then for a newbie to know what is a “fair” price quote and what isn’t.

Unfortunately, apples do not get compared to apples … too often shiny crisp apples get compared to rotting oranges. In other words … if I quote you $1000.00 for a custom  website design, which happens to also include custom header graphics; some special scripts needed in order that it performs as you wish; and keyword research has been performed and all your tags have been written and properly optimized; and of course there are many many more hours of hand holding and such involved before your new site finally goes live … but you find “someone who says they are really good at HTML coding” who can build you a website for $200.00 … and you JUMP at the $200.00 “deal” … what do you think you will end up with?

Hmmm??

Yup, You Will 99.99% Most Assuredly End Up With A Mess!

You guessed it. Because Jennie had no clue as to what constitues a solid, properly designed, properly coded, properly SEO’d and technically sound site, yes … she thought the price we quoted her was maybe “more than she needed to spend” (her words). Please note the price we quoted her happened to be less than my $1000.00 example.

So she thought “well gee … it’s just a website … $200.00 sounds fair to me”. And off she went and plunked down her $200.00 with that “really good HTML coder”.

But (and this is true my friends, I am NOT making this up) oh my! What she ended up with! That “HTML expert” used FrontPage to design the site. Mistake #1! Anybody involved in website design ought to know that FrontPage has been obsolete for a good while. And quite honestly, anyone who understands HTML knows that FrontPage adds a lot of code bloat, among other things.

In addition, the “design” of the site (if you can call it that) was tired looking. Maybe OK for 1999, but not up to 2008 standards. If you’re going to pay for a brand spanking new site, then please … at least make sure design-wise you are getting something that reflects current web design trends. Why start out looking dated?

So, to make a long story short, I received an email from Jennie a few weeks ago. Her first words were “I should have listened to you to begin with …”. And she was saying “please Claudia, how much will you charge to clean up this mess and get me online with a website?” She provided the URL to her “new” site in the email.

After one look, it was clear there wasn’t going to be any “cleaning up”! That website was a design disgrace. No ethical SEO consultant would even think of optimizing a site like that, either. That would be stealing money from the client.

First things first was to design her a technically correct website and one that was also properly SEO’d. I told her if she was willing this time to do it right, and spend the money necessary to start out on the right foot … then we’d be more than happy to take her on as a client! She agreed.

And remember folks, you are also paying for the knowledge and expertise the web designer or SEO consultant brings to the table! That is worth a whole lot to the ultimate success of your website project, too.

Moral of the story … you usually DO get exactly what you pay for! As I told Jennie, “I guess you can look at that $200.00 as a valuable learning curve and maybe if nothing else, it did get you motivated to write the content for your web pages!”

• Let’s Talk About Good Versus Messy HTML Codes •
• An SEO Friendly Website Includes Clean Coding, Too •

In the normal course of steps I take when doing research for my clients, I will take a look at the HTML source code of the top ranking competitor websites.

A web page is created using a language called Hypertext Markup Language, usually referred to as “HTML code”. This code is of the utmost importance, as it tells the web browsers how to interpret your webpage. In other words, the HTML coding is responsible for making everything “show up” on your computer screen.

I look at the competitions’ sites, as I need to see how well, or in most cases how half-heartedly, they have applied the basic search engine optimization techniques to their Title tag, and Description and Keyword Meta tags.

I also look to see how cleanly coded those competitors sites are. If you are not aware, it is most important that your website does not suffer from HTML “code bloat”. Just as you expect the term bloat to mean when it comes to our tummies … it means the same in coding issues.

Code Bloat Is Not  SEO Friendly!

The more unnecessary and/or downright sloppy HTML coding that exists on your site, the more difficult you are making it for a search engine spider to crawl through to try and figure out what your webpage is all about.

In addition, the search engine spiders will only attempt to maneuver just so far down through the maze of HTML. Those little spiders will stop at a certain point and leave your page! Did you realize this?

So, if you or your web designer have a poor grasp of what constitutes good vs. sloppy coding … you might be causing yourself to lose some ranking points.

When I am hired on as a professional SEO consultant, I owe it to a potential client to discuss the status of many behind-the-scenes issues, one of them being the coding. Reason being, if a website is suffering from code bloat, then my efforts at trying to address basic SEO issues will not be as effective as possible. Many times I refuse to perform SEO services until the client has gotten the coding issues cleaned up!

If you are in the market to hire a professional SEO consultant to optimize your site, please be aware they should discuss all aspects of your site.

If you are told that all you need is a keyword report run and on-page optimization handled, and there is NO conversation about the entire “health” of your website’s technical aspects (HTML coding, etc.) and design structure, well … I’d take my money and run, and I’d be on the search for another SEO consultant to interview!

Let’s Have An SEO Friendly Site — Acquaint Yourself With Proper HTML

If you’ve got a website or blog, taking the time to learn how to hand code even basic HTML will go a long way for you. Not only are you learning valuable information that will serve you well, such as knowing how to enhance your own content with things like hyperlinks, bullet points, etc., but you will become aware of what good vs. bad coding is all about.

In addition, if you do hire someone to serve as your webmaster, you’ll have knowledge of whether they truly have a professional level understanding of proper HTML coding or not!.

It is becoming more often than not, that a new client who comes to me for SEO work happens to have a horrible code-bloated website. Unfortunately the person they have been paying as their webmaster is very uneducated as to proper HTML coding protocols.

If you’d like to start to acquaint yourself with HTML issues, I can point you to one great source to check out. Investigate this free teaching site: W3Schools HTML Tutorials. Look over to the menu bar on the left and you’ll see over 20+ different interactive lessons and also reference guides for things like colors, symbols and functions.

I encourage you to learn basic HTML. We all should have SEO friendly sites!

• Let’s Take A Look At Good Versus Messy HTML Codes •
• SEO Friendly Websites Include Clean Coding Practices •

In the normal course of steps I take when doing research for my clients, I will take a look at the HTML source code of the top ranking competitor websites. I need to see how well, or in most cases how half-heartedly, they have applied the basic search engine optimization techniques to their Title tag, and Description and Keyword meta tags.

I also do this in order to see how cleanly coded the site is. If you are not aware, it is most important that your website does not suffer from HTML “code bloat”. Just as you expect the term bloat to mean … it means the same in coding issues. The more unnecessary and/or downright sloppy HTML coding that exists on your site, the more difficult you are making it for a search engine spider to crawl through to try and figure out what your web page content is all about.

In addition, the search engine spiders will only attempt to maneuver just so far down through the maze of HTML coding. Those little spiders will stop at a certain point and leave your page! Did you realize this? So, if you or your web designer have a poor grasp of what good vs. sloppy coding is … at the very least you might be causing yourself to lose some ranking points.

In my capacity as a professional SEO consultant, I would be doing a disservice to a potential client if I did not discuss the status of many behind-the-scenes issues of their site, one of them being the HTML coding. Reason being, if a website is suffering from code bloat, then my effort at trying to only address basic SEO issues (optimization of the tags) quite likely will not be as truly effective as it could be.

If you are in the market to hire a professional SEO consultant to optimize your site, please be aware they should discuss all aspects of your site.

If you are told that all you need is a keyword report and on-page optimization, but there is NO conversation about the entire “health” of your website’s technical aspects (HTML coding, etc.) and its design structure, well … I’d take my money and run, and I’d be on the search for another SEO consultant to interview!

Oh Wow! What A Mess I Stumbled Upon Yesterday

Since I do believe a picture can be worth a thousand words, I will share with you today exactly what a website’s HTML coding should NOT  look like! Talk about code bloat, well here is some to set your eyes on! I don’t think I could have tried to make up an example for you as well as this real-life example!

On a side note, this coding comes from a website that boasts that they provide webmaster services! Pleeeease … that would be like me trying to tell you I am a professional graphic designer because I have the ability to resize an image to put on my blog.

People like these who are touting themselves as “web designers” do nothing more than give you a (crummy) site. They get your hard earned money … and you end up with something that one day, when you become more knowledgeable about what constitutes a good vs. bad design, you’ll have to spend more money on, in order to correct the HTML mess.

First, let me show you what “clean” HTML coding looks like.

The Basic HTML Website Code Structure

Alright, though this is extremely simplistic in the fact that a web page full of content, graphics, and maybe even AdSense ads or other advertisements, will have many, many more HTML tags, there are still thousands and thousands of websites in existence today that are really quite simple. And for those of you trying to learn how to hand code your own webpages, this will also serve as a good teaching example.

OK … let me move on to the good stuff! (This example is so awful, I almost can’t stop laughing!)

Here is an excellent example of not only code bloat, but some glaring sloppy mistakes that NO true web designer worth their weight would ever make. See if you can spot them (I’ll point them out in a moment).

**Note: This is only the “head” portion of the web page. The content or “body” area was even worse than what you will see here!

OK, pretty bad, eh?  I guess it can be said the individual had NO CLUE about clean HTML coding, let alone what SEO-friendly coding is!  A CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) should have been utilized based on what I see.  I won’t go into explaining the why’s or how’s of CSS in this post — click on the link to learn about the value of using CSS for a cleanly coded site.

Now, as far as the very sloppy and unprofessional mistakes made in the “head” area of the web page’s coding, I have highlighted two of the three areas where this wonderful web designer (groan) goofed!

The mistakes are:

• Two sets of “Title” tags
• Two sets of “head” tags (there is another closing head tag–I had to chop it off for the screenshot)
• And .. there is NO very-important-for-SEO-purposes DESCRIPTION tag!

There are other sloppy things I could discuss here, but I won’t. The bottom line is that I am attempting to show you what NOT to do to your website, if you are the person handling the HTML coding. And again, I am also showing you this in case your site already looks like this (did you hire a web designer?), or in case you are getting ready to have your very first website designed for you.

Make sure to ask any web designer you are thinking about hiring if you can see examples of the sites they’ve designed. Then, utilize the “View Source” option in your web browser to take a behind the scenes look at how well (or how poorly) they performed the HTML coding.

And please make sure they provide all the correct HTML tags in the “head” section so you can properly search engine optimize your site!