Superior SEO Web Design
 

Hi all, and especially amigo :)

Hope you'll bear with me on this one, I'm using the super-powerful Taree Internet domain in a little seo experiment.

I'd also like to discuss what separates truly superior seo web design from the rest and I think that given the performance of the Taree Internet domain in the SEO searches in general, and the superior sulumits retsambew entry in particular, this is the right place. (can you imagine the answers you'd get to this on DP? :) )

A Superior SEO Web Design is something i don't really have on TareeInternet. Speaking of the design i really have to give this place a new look soon. The forum is "ok" but the front end pages have all sorts of layout problems. It was my first attempt at trying to seamlessly design a Wordpress and vBulletin theme together so next one should be better.

With the front end i made the markup Valid xHTML Strict and the forum Valid xHTML Transitional. Although this doesn't directly effect SEO, i feel it's still a "good to do" thing to avoid any problems.

Also the home page i kept very light weight and fast loading, plus have good code to content ratio:

Only 4kb of markup and 6kb total page size which is tiny. The other thing i done was killed the stylesheets to view the raw page similar to what bots see and try to optimize the placement of important elements within the HTML. For instance, home page with all CSS zapped:

http://www.tareeinternet.com/forum/i...-webdesign.png

As you can see first thing is "SEO" in H1 as a clickable link pointing to home, followed by a secondary keyphrase in H2. These are a CSS image replacement so humans don't see this unless using a non-css capable browser or screen reader.

Then comes the menu, this is something i want to improve upon next design and put it beneath the content but make it appear at the top with CSS. This will put the important content much closer to the top. I done this with the side menu stuff, you can see the whole page here to get a better idea. Next version with hopefully be:

Main Title - H1
Secondary Title - H2
Page Content
Menus
Footer

The forums where much harder to do this with due to all the menu's and vBulletins use of tables instead of div's, however the new vB4 due out soon is supposed to be fully DIV/CSS based. So i'm waiting on that before making any more major design changes.

Well.. That's most of my Superior SEO Web Design tricks for TareeInternet. The forum i done more on, a lot of which was throwing a whole bucket load of default vB code in the trash. :D

so what's on Wordpress the main site?

Agreed, small fast loading pages are definitely a part of a superior SEO design. It's something we havent paid much (any) attention to really and just whack 350k .jpgs all over our own site through laziness basically.

but our site was built on a strong CSS / XHTML template by dcarter, (although extensively modified and de-validated in most places :) ) with the idea that if you can take a template and alter it and rank it as a demo, it could be (is) somebody else's site design we built the SEO content into.

This is definitely important, nearly all the WP "sniper" themes you see have the primary KW in an H1 as the first thing on the page via a lynx viewer.

We had a good look at this on choosing the HTML template but ultimately decided that as the nav was going to be kw based, reading the nav with a whole load of kw links to inner pages targeting the terms was probably ok too.

and not presenting the onpage content first doesnt seem to hurt us.

I tend to just view the google cache with "text only" selected for the view youve shown there.

http://www.seoibiza.com/style/cache.jpg

we basically set the site up with the intention of each and every static sub page ranking for it's own terms eventually, right up to the main domain for "SEO" and "Ibiza" separately, and for most of the static site we do now.

Then we feed in extra content as required via the blog to supplement, and build up layers of thematic content around the topic.

ah now there's some advanced stuff going on on the forum isnt there? :) for example my title on this post was "superior seo web design" ..

yet the URL reads:

/knowledgebase/3514-superior-search-engine-optimization-web-design.html

phrase based url rewriting? :) or is that just standard forum tricks?

I think the forum and the site look really nice, I like the big text and the look of accessibility and cleanliness youve achieved, nice easy clear to read content, and yet massive rankings in the big phrases. I mean youre still mooching about in the US top 20 for "SEO" without doing any work on it for like 2 years now?

and you dont think you have a superior seo web design going on here?

lolwut? :)

Using Header tags in the website content is very important for an SEO.

Yes all the main pages are WP, aka the homepage and everything up in the big top menu except the "SEO Forum" link. There's also a few WP pages that aren't linked from the sitewide header navigation. In other words, a sculpting that doesn't employ nofollow because i knew Cuttsy would turn around one day and say opps guess what? :D

The funny thing is, every one of those pages like this one are a toolbar PR5 just the same as the sitewide ones. I've always been a fan of smart linking to funnel importance rather than using nofollow.

Have i got a tool for you: http://smush.it

It's made by the guys from the Yahoo Performance Team, it crushes images a ton without messing with the image quality. One click and you can compress every image on the page. I use this tool extensively, almost every image on this site in the design and in posts has been done with it.

If you install the Firefox plugin and it still points to their old .com and doesn't work let me know, because i unpacked the Firefox .xpi file and fixed the javascript and packed it back up so it works with the correct domain.

No it's working well, and actually your site has uncanny similarities with this one in regards to a more static front, a more dynamic internal section (yours is the blog, mine the forum) plus the raw text version is similar except for the links up top.
Oops caught! :D

Yeah there's a bunch of rewriting, stemming and other monkey business going on. But to be honest the implementation isn't as "smart" as i would like, for instance that particular replacement resulted in a URL that IMHO is too long and would of been better left as just "SEO".

I done it when i put the forum up at the start of 07, but if i done it again today i would do it much better.. For example the character length doesn't take in to account this part of the URL:

tareeinternet.com/forum/knowledgebase/

In the SEO section it pans out ok because i get /seo/ for the category, then the long version in the threads URL so it doesn't doubt up with "SEO" twice in the URL. But it does still work ok, just not as clever as i like.

Thanks, i kind of got it right but the whole thing was a bit rushed. I done everything in one go, a day and the best part of the night then threw it live without checking different browsers/resolutions because i was asleep at the keyboard lol. So it is borked in some browsers, and with a horizontal scroller at some resolutions.

I guess, i have done a bit to the forum under the surface i'm not to sure Google even see's it as a forum. I have de-footprinted it a bit, like no box down below saying "vB Code is On" and icon keys, jump menus etc like normal forums.

Google has been buggy with this site the past week, notice how this isn't showing for Superior SEO Web Design after so long? However Google Alerts pinged me 30 minutes after you posted this.

Unrelated note, DP's PR just fell to PR4. :p

I did notice it was a little slow to assess it and show it, they indexed quick enough, although it's there now.

and lol @ DP.. whoops :) they were a 7 a year or so back.

Personally I think the single most important thing you do to a site (apart from pagetitles) is get the internal linkage, weighting and anchors correct.

obviously at the design stage is the time to do this. IMO superior seo design is all about getting the site structure and architecture right (and scalable!) from the beginning so that you can go all the way to the top.

it starts earlier than that of course, the kw research should be fully understood before you even register a domain name, because in the earlier stages that will play a large part in any specific kw performance. (not because of domain weighting of course, but because of IBL anchors if you have right name)

guess what our ultimate keyword/s are? (...hey how come you outrank us for "SEO"? :) )

superior seo design my old son ;)

Superior SEO Web Design
 

Maybe I'm missing something here when it comes to superior SEO web design.

Yes, architecture is important (critical) but if you're going after a particular term I believe I've already proven that content still is King. How can you promote the "single most important thing" when I still have the #1 spot for the term and, at least by your own report, my site sucks for SEO?

I know that a freakin' boat load of content ain't easy. It's not as "elegant" as some solutions, but an avalanche is still an avalanche and it's damn hard to overcome with finesse. (ever tried to dance out of a tsunami?)

Perhaps I have this all wrong. It could very well be that my head is firmly impeding the flow from my anal orifice. Could even be that I have no idea what-so-ever what I'm talking about.

I only have one question... why am I still at #1 for the term?

Help me here guys, when it comes down to it, what does superior SEO web design really mean if it doesn't mean ranking #1?

lol. hi Tim.

you havent been watching SERPs for very long have you?

they move you know. :D

a #1 ranking for a week or two is not exactly unassailable and its not like putting a couple of blog posts up is a concerted effort to win it back either.

"content is king" is the biggest cliche in the book and means different things to everybody you talk to, but youre the first I've known use the phrase to mean that bucketloads of it is king :)

I dont think you'd find many pro SEOs who would agree with you that 10k of repetitive words that aren't designed to be read by real people is what Google mean by that.

IMO what it actually means is that if your content is good enough, people will link to you and then you rank.

if you think you have the answer however, please do feel free to demonstrate it's use say here business seo ?

or here search engine optimization facts

or here small business seo web design

I promise you dumping bucketloads of rehashed text and repeating the phrase 180 times in various <h's> wont work in those places.

and check Business SEO Scotland :) funny.

still trying...
 

working on superior SEO now (already #4, which can't be seen as too bad!)

but the one that I actually want to take is one that is really getting traffic, we'll see how that goes and, of course, I'll let you know how that works out. When I get the #1 for my next target we'll see if you can take it back.

Never-the-less, it is fun, just being here. I know I'm new, inexperienced and know next to nothing, however, it seems like most of what I'm doing is getting results, so all I can do is keep on doing it. After all, if it works, it's pretty hard to knock, isn't it? (or is it... LOL)

Thanks again for inviting me, it's a real honor even to have you guys talk to me... I appreciate having your insight and knowing that even though you're laughing at me, at least you're still talking.

all the very best,

TN