Must Design

With 22,000+ views SEO for Web Designers blew up thanks to a defined tribal audiences, advocates and luck. Discover tips on how to blow your content up too.

17,162 People Later
We've been asked to make the presentation that created our most viewed Hiaku Deck again at the Iron Yard Code Academy again (made the first presentation six months ago). There were important ideas we shared last time:

* SEO THRIVES or DIES with graphic designers.

* Graphic designers are heroes under siege by many groups.

* Set REALISTIC expectations.
* Set reasonable boundaries (with gorillas looking for bananas).
* Shared a few easy to remember tips to help designers improve their technical SEO skills.

Obviously we hit a nerve. We will be updating benchmarks shared six months ago to see how those we mentioned fared since.  Remember technical SEO is important, but your content must engage, be exciting (visually too) and develop sustainable online community to win over time. 

Good luck and if you have SEO questions we didn't cover email them to martin(at)Curagami.com and we will include and send you a Curagami Rules tee.  

Web Designer SEO
Our SEO Tips for Web Designers hit a nerve. It is heading to 13,000 views (probably today). We hit a nerve because web Designers are where SEO rubber meets the road. This Haiku Deck is full of SEO tips for web designer including:

* Know who has the banana and why.
* Know how much SEO you need to know.

* Learn what is MIST vs what is Gorilla.
* Listen Digitally.
* Understand how SEO & Content marketing work together.

* Design to Win Hearts, Minds and Loyalty. 

And More SEO tips designed for designers.  

Beautiful Unusual Navigation Designs for Inspiration. Selection of Awwwards websites with a strong presence of unusual navigation. An effective navigation design is crucial for a website

Yesterday an article on Medium, Snowfallen, caught my eye. It's about a technique for presenting longform writing online, by embellishing it with integrated

Canonical URLs Explained
The Yoast post provides an easy way to understand why rel=canonical is a powerful new SEO tag. Yoast has a dog in the hunt. They make a Magento plugin that easily writes the rel=canonical tag into a product page's head.

The explanation about WHY canonical URLs are so important is only half right. We have a million ways of expressing and sharing URLs these days. Without rel=canonical we end up duping content to distraction.

Here's the rub. All ecommerce sites dupe content. They must. When I was a Director of Ecommerce a single product accounted for 50% of our profits. You better believe I merchandised that product into every nook and cranny our site offered. I duped that product and it's content to distraction.

There are other ways to limit duplication including:

* Use of your Robots.txt file.
* Locking content behind a firewall.  

* Use of blockquotes & rel=canonical tags. 
* Rewrite duplicated content so it's not as duplicated (lol). 

We included our email output into a folder with a "no follow" line in our robots.txt. You may think such a move is enough. It isn't. Be sure NOT to drive links from spiderable content INTO that folder or you eliminate the effectiveness of the robots.txt.

In the end every ecom site worth it's salt MUST duplicate content. Rewriting sounds like a good strategy, but it isn't. Content = time and time = money when managing million dollar commercial sites. You will be duping content.

Best to use rel=canonical because it shows Google you aren't trying to STEAL anything. Reminds me of what a friend shared about the disavow tool (used to deny inbound links or signal they may be untrusted).

 My friend was using the disavow tool daily on his clients accounts. "So you are brown-nosing Google," I kidded him. "Exactly," was his answer. Rel=canonical tells Google you are TRYING to do the right thing and sometimes that is enough. 

Website MacGuffins are ideas such as Free Shipping whose absence hurts more than their presence helps. What are your website's MacGuffins?

Seasonality creates relevance & relevance creates community. Every website's hero should change at least 4x a year: Summer, Fall, Winter & Spring.

Last week, Jeremy Osborn, Academic Director for Aquent Gymnasium, had the chance to attend the Artifact Conference. Here are his key takeaways.

Marty Note
This Artifact Conference looks interesting and worth checkout out (http://artifactconf.com/ ). I love this quote from the Responsive panel at the conference in Providence, RI:

"On the other hand, responsive design is forcing companies to prioritize site performance. The consensus is that slow-loading and bloated sites are just as much of a “design” flaw as confusing layout, clashing colors, and the rampant proliferation of typefaces on page. "

Most designers focus on how to accordion a website so it looks good on any device. The real challenge is deeper. How do we architect "less bloat"? How do we design information to be lean and responsive?

Couple of things I've noticed include:

* Building stories via visuals and rich snippets.
* Taking advantage of the swipe and spin options on mobile devices.
* Creating easier to understand backend functionality.
* Using a LEAN or MEAN filter forcing messaging to get to the point FAST.

The SEO and engagement benefits of the second half of responsive design - the information architecture half - are enormous. We know that as engagement goes up so do our site's heuristics and the "new Google" loves more time on site, lower bounce rates and other "engagement metrics".

The "Responsive Challenge" for designers is to realize more is involved than look and feel. The very core of our communication must be reviewed, reevaluated and changed to be leander and more responsive too or we design dissonance in. Confused customers do many things converting is never one of them.