I see it on Active Rain almost daily and a handful of articles a week land in my inbox, touting SEO WordPress Blog Design and such.  I hate to tell you, but there is no such thing.  There is website design, wordpress website design, blog design and then there is SEO.  But there is no such thing as SEO Blog Design.  Doesn’t exist, no matter how many pages of Google those phrases come up on.

While a well built website should be optimized for search engines, SEO is not part of ANY design element.  Proper permalinks, tag clouds, keywords and all that jazz that goes into SEO should not at any point be confused with actual design and development of your website.  So next time you run into a provider touting their SEO Website Design skills, think about it for a minute or two before buying into it hook, line and sinker.  We all want to rank in Google and elsewhere, but your website, above all else, is (or should be) a reflection of you, your personality, your market, your brand.  Every day your website is someone’s first, and at times, only impression of you, and your only chance to capture that stranger who happens to land on it. 

If your site is designed by an SEO blogging coach, you might appeal to Google, with loads of bold keywords, links and bits of anchor text strategically positioned to attract the spiders, but will your bloated tag clouds on your home page serve your visitors?  Will your readers trust you enough to want to call you?  Will someone landing on your, for the sake of example, real estate website feel immediately that they are in the right place?

As tempting as the SEO Blog Design promise sounds, it’s just SEO, with no design involved.  And that’s the way it should be.  Your content, proper category and link structure, clean code, fast load times and a slew of other parameters will determine where you come up on Google.  Great website design will help keep your visitors on a site, and help them easily find exactly what they are looking for, the whole time feeling rather comfortable, and not the least bit defensive.  Making that happen is a science and an art, and can’t be taught in a webinar.

If you feel so inclined, subscribe to hamedia marketing blog.  We are a spam-free shop.

Some other usefull Real Estate website design articles:

SEO Blogging, Content and website analytics - a how to.

Getting a new real estate website design? how much of you site will you own?

Wordpress real estate site - it's all about the interface

Gadgets, themes and plugins for your WordPress site - it's not about the gadgets...

Inna Hardison is owner of
 

follow hamedia on facebook follow me on twitter follow me on linked in

Full Service marketing, design, printing. Click for more on Real Estate Website Design by HaMedia, Brand Development or read what our clients say about us.

For our members only print store savings, sign up here.

 
Post is included in group: Coaching-Personal Development
Post is included in group: Marketing 101
Post is included in group: SEO Bootcamp
Post is included in group: Services for Real Estate Professionals
Post is included in group: WordPress Blog

8 Comments on SEO WordPress Blog Design and other oxymorons…

APR
21
2011
197,638 Points 2 Featured Posts

Well put, Inna. It's time for the folks who sell On-site SEO as a total SEO solution to get honest and stop overcharging for underperformance. Wordpress stands alone in its search optimization right out of the box. All the plugins and configurations are mere tweaks to an already near-perfect platform. Google knows perfectly well how to read a Wordpress blog without you doing anything to it. The only plugin I really think matters that much is the Google XML sitemaps one, because it can bring Google around to pick up your new content faster than if you wait for it to make its usual visit. Google is pretty fast on its own though. Lately new Wordpress blogs I've built have been indexed within days, even before I install anything.

Design is an honest business. In my opinion, any time there is collusion between the terms design and SEO, there is dishonesty involved, especially when the particular brand of "SEO" excludes a well formed link-building campaign. Folks can argue all day about what is appropriate in link-building but nobody is going to get too far without it. Even these posts on ActiveRain get placed high in the search engines because, in great part, of the fact that there are currently around 1,089,854 back-links to Active-Rain. It's kind of like having a lot of the work done for you in advance.
12:29pm • #1
1,552,023 Points 277 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog Hit Router Attended Rain Camp Called Shot Master

You explain the difference very well. There is design and then there is SEO. And sometimes less is more. I have also seen these amazing websites with all the flash and java, beautifully designed but you can not even SEO the darn beauties. because load times are too slow and you have to enter through the movie which of course, Google does not read flash. They are working on it but it is not here yet. 
1:48pm • #2
208,810 Points 25 Featured Posts

well written.......easy to read....impossible to understand....well not impossible, but improbable....but, that is why god gave some folks apptitude.........much better gift when shared without attitude........i hope to be easy to read, easy to find and relatively productive in my twi-light years
4:50pm • #3
APR
22
2011
1,360,743 Points 93 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog Called Shot Master

Is SEO in a title just a hook?  I read a post by a real estate agent recently with "SEO" in the title and it was about some great sites online but they are not SEO sites, knowing about them is not going to confer SEO on an ActiveRain member's WordPress or AR blog...  I can not remember what they all were. 

They were sites that offered something related to technology... a couple would make a site better... but they were not SEO sites.

ActiveRain has always attracted a lot of snake oil salesmen... and the confused... and then for some there is more confusion...
11:25am • #4
APR
23
2011
200,002 Points 16 Featured Posts Called Shot Master
Victoria, so that anyone searching for it has both sides of the story, of course
5:13pm • #6
MAY
07
2011
1,360,743 Points 93 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog Called Shot Master

Where did I leave my keys…?

confused in Columbus... is the link in #5 to something you wrote Inna?
9:40am • #7
200,002 Points 16 Featured Posts Called Shot Master

Maureen - I think it was maybe to something she wrote... Dunno:-)
12:16pm • #8
MAY
25
2011
2 Featured Posts Hit Router Called Shot Master

Well, I've learned something new just by following the links in this article. Thank you for sharing.
9:46am • #9


What does the graphic say?
Leave a response…

(optional)
Spam Prevention:
 
Inna-shane-pic Rainmaker_large

Inna Hardison- HaMedia Group Wordpress for Real Estate &Design,Print

Orlando, FL

More about me…

ha media group

Address: Palm Coast, FL, 32164

Office Phone: (386) 597-0304

Email Me

Marketing Services For Real Estate: website design, real estate wordpress sites, facebook business pages and much more. With a dash of humor and life as I see it.

Sign up for our print store specials and save 20%-50% on business cards, postcards of flyers:Sing up here


HaMediaShop, Printing, Design, Web

  • Feedjit Live Blog Stats


    • Listings

    Links

    Archives

    RSS 2.0 Feed for this blog

    Find FL real estate agents and Orlando real estate on ActiveRain.