SEO and brand authority
Through tailoring page content to best suit the workings of search engine algorithms, SEO professionals can boost webpages on search engine results pages (SERPs), increasing their likelihood of being clicked by searchers. However some SEO commentators argue that, though web designers should remain careful with their keywords and meticulous about their metadata, a greater emphasis should be placed on garnering trust and authority in brands through quality of content and clarity of message.
SEO for now and beyond
An article on Search Engine Watch by Pratik Dholakiya flags up seven SEO pitfalls that can harm a page’s search rankings. Dholakiya, while acknowledging the importance of providing a good user experience through useful content, advocates strong SEO practices. Good keyword usage is still important, as is maintaining a collection of quality inbound links and an up-to-date, debugged sitemap. Google’s ever-changing mass of ‘crawler’ code, though much more sophisticated than it was in the beginning, remains respectful of good optimisation.
Give your brand authority
Lisa Buyer, appearing on digital media website Mashable, subverts the idea that SEO is king in digital marketing by exploring the concept of brand authority. Put simply: no amount of SEO will make up for poor content that is neither useful nor entertaining. High ranking websites carry quality content, written by an author with experience in the article’s topic, that resonates with their target audience.
A winning combination
Whatever a business’s primary focus, it is clear that both good SEO and brand authority are essential to reaching the very top of SERPs and thus maximising audience reach. The challenge for professionals in the fields of web mastering and SEO, such as Viziononline web designers, is to encourage the marrying of these concepts with a view to making every website they produce as marketable to their users as they are to Google’s spiders.
Website builders are well versed in both on- and off-site optimisations techniques, from structural and coding tweaks to introducing blogging and link generation to their products. If it is in their remit to produce content the designer will ensure that content is relevant and useful to a given target audience or else will advise their clients to do so. They will also be aware of the role that formatting for laptop and mobile devices and page-load speeds plays in the ranking of webpages.
