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How Much SEO Web Designers Know?

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by Mr_Kumar, Apr 18, 2019.

  1. #1
    Hello Dear,

    I believe this forum is related to web design and web designers. And there is one concern every designer face... the SEO requirements while designing the web pages.

    I want to know what is the current level of SEO skills web designers are having these days. Are you guys able to do...

    (1) Keyword Research Yourself [Though it is not recommended for you]
    (2) Write Title, Meta [Again not recommended for you]
    (3) Reduce to page size [Must for you; its your job]
    (4) Implementation (or fulfilling) the emotional need of the target audience in your design [A visualizer is required here, but still]
    (5) Understand and implement the sales funnel?
    (7) Making pages for ALL browsers, ALL devices, ALL resolutions [Must for you; its your job]
    (8) you can add your points in this list.

    I'll wait to hear back.

    Cheers!!
     
    Mr_Kumar, Apr 18, 2019 IP
  2. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #2
    The notion of SEO, design, and front-end coding being three separate things remains one of the most ignorant mentally-enfeebled part of the industry. SEO should be a SMALL but essential part of site-building, but it does NOT warrant an industry unto and of itself.

    This is particularly given how utterly dumbass and outright scammy things like keyword research is... or at least can be. I'm always reminded of this clown from a decade or so ago on another (now defunct) forums bragging about how great his SEO was, and as an example he used what I call "magic search terms". It ranked first on google for a number of search terms, sounds good, right?

    Well, every other search result was about painting or powder coating automotive engines. The product was a photoshop extension. DO WE SEE THE PROBLEM HERE?

    It has been and remains my experience that the majority of "SEO Experts" full of more manure than Biff Tannen's '48 Ford Super De Luxe. (no, that's not a typo on "de luxe"). I hate manure. From keyword stuffing in manners that eventually get you slapped down for abuse, to title and attribute tag values that make the SERP listing look like crap, to overstuffed keywords meta proving they have zero damned business writing a single line of code for websites... it's a mish-mash of scam artist BS so utterly ridiculous, it makes a realtor saying he's going to "drain the swamp" sound legitimate.

    TITLE is for the window frame title, tab title, or link on a SERP or automated backlink. As such the most useful format is "Page Title - Site Title". With a hyphen. NOT a comma, NOT a vertical break (aka "pipe" for the *nix whacks who know jack-all about anything). Hyphen. Get with it.

    Description META is a plain text paragraph briefly describing the site and/or current page, preferably coming in under 160 characters, though some UA's will ignore anything past the first 128. It is NOT a place to blindly stuff keywords no matter what some "reasearch" twaddle claims. Misuse of this META is one of the fastest ways to get it ignored or the site slapped down in search for possible abuse.

    Keywords META is for SEVEN OR EIGHT SINGLE WORDS OR PROPER NAMES that exists inside BODY as actual content (plaintext / CDATA), preferably of 128 characters or less (though some recommend 80 or less). IT IS NOT a place to blindly stuff keywords that have nothing to do with the page, or spend endless mindless word jumbles with. Hence this:

    <meta
      name="keywords"
      content="baby sitter, sitter, baby, keene, baby keene, sitter keene, baby sitter keene"
    >
    Code (markup):
    Is utter and complete nonsense created by people who dont' understand what a keywords META is even for, (more so if those words don't appear in side BODY) and guaranteed to be ignored. In fact that such abuse is automatically ignored by most every search UA, it has led to the MYTH that a keywords META does nothing. It still works, even in Google so long as you don't use it wrong! Seven or eight single words / proper names that exist inside BODY as content ideally coming to 80 characters or less with a 128 character limit. Anything else is BULLSHIT!

    ... and of course all those OpenGraph (og: ), Facebook (fb: ), and similar META will (or at least should ) fall back on the non-prefixed values, which is why even including most of them -- PARTICULARLY with the same flipping values -- is equal amounts of incompetence and ignorance, simply wasting bandwidth for NOTHING of value. Hence why I say the only OpenGraph value worth a flying purple fish is "og:image".

    ... NONE of which is a "design" thing since that should be uniform across all pages regardless of what's going on for accessibility or appearance.

    But then that hinges on what one means by design. If you mean some know-nothing twaddle scam artist sitting their spanking it on a graphics tablet in Photoshop, that is not design! That's art. Art is not design, as design is engineering that incorporates art. Hence why the designs that start life as PSD's or other image formats are universally bloated, slow, inaccessible garbage cobbled together by people unqualified to be working with websites in the first huffing place.

    Reducing the page size is indeed important, but not always the same thing as faster loading. Monolithic stylesheets for an entire site (everything unique to the site and subpages as a single stylesheet) being an example of where you can reduce bandwidth use with situations that can be more code. This is because if a user visits more than one page of your site frequently you have pre-cached the appearance in the CSS. That's why semantic markup is important, why avoiding deep nesting of elements in the markup is important, part of why keeping the number of separate elements to a minimum is important, and so forth. An external CSS file can be cached, if the HTML ends up different putting appearance in the markup is just stupid.

    That's why I say 99% of the time you see style="" and 100% of the time you see <STYLE> the code is utter trash put together by people who don't understand how websites work. It is to that end when people take PageSpeed Insights advice of "move style into the markup to speed page-load" they're actually screwing over their site, as that technique only pays dividends on single-page websites.

    That element count also impacts scripting, particularly if you go full Gungan doing document.getElement(s)byXXXX or querySelector-style methodology every other damned line of your scripting -- since more elements just means more crap for those scripting functions to wade through. Likewise for CSS the application of selectors takes longer since it has to walk the entire DOM. Meesa sayz yew nevers goes FULL Gungan.

    Even more important than file sizes though is file counts. Ever notice how uploading via FTP 1000 separate 10k files takes ten to twenty times longer than a single 10 megabyte file? That's the overhead of "handshaking". Whilst HTTP handshaking is not as bad as FTP thanks to HTTP packets and responses aligning well with TCP ones, (FTP/TELNET is shockingly inefficient) that overhead of a separate file request can bite you quick. Whilst there are many techniques for requesting multiple files side-by-side, and Google's "SPDY" protocol allows one connection to enqueue multiple requests at once, the simple fact is real world you cannot predict how many connections the client -- much less the server -- will have free. To that end keeping the number of separate files to a minimum is essential. It's the reason that when I see a website loading 15 stylesheets and 30+ separate scripts I go "Whisky Tango Foxtrot is this idiocy?".. whereas the average framework fanboy with their incompetence replies "BOHICA" with the big green weenie; when they're the ones deserving of the big chicken dinner.

    Good rule of thumb? Assume that the majority of people are going to have a 1/5th of a second penalty for each separate file on a page past the first eight, that any file over 256k will likely be purged from cache on mobile REGARDLESS of what you set the expire time to (which is why dicking with cache-control headers is more bullshit than fact), and why no matter how fast it is for YOU, assume normal people are slower.

    One of my favorite tests for that being to go into a busy hipster coffee shop with goofy cup size names and everything EXCEPT coffee flavored coffee during their peak hours when all the college kids are in there, and seeing what it does on an android 2 tablet for speed. THAT is a real-world test. Sitting at the office on a 150mbps business fiber isn't it... particularly here in the colonies where we still have most of rural America paying upwards of two Benjamins for 384kbps down.

    My response to the "Can you hear me now?" commercials: "nope, your overpriced service still hasn't brought G3 to our area, we barely have reliable 1800mhz GSM."

    Getting real sick of hearing "But it's fast for me" on multi-megabyte pages built from a hundred or more separate files -- Well lah-dee-huffing-dah for YOU!"

    Now, when I hear "emotional need" it sets off my BS marketspeak double-talk alarm. F*** "emotional need". Just pain needs. Accessibility and more importantly, letting the user do what it is they came to the site to do -- which 99%+ of the time is ACCESS CONTENT! CONTENT people damnit, CONTENT!!!

    Goofy animated crap, slideshows, pushing the actual content below the fold, wasting so much time on a space-wasting oversized CTA users can't find anything else, goofy bandwidth wasting art and graphics, and hosts of other BS that adds nothing of value to the page, and gets in the way of what's ACTUALLY important, THE CONTENT or a means of navigating to THE CONTENT!

    Which is why most such nonsense amounts to little more than dumping a can of shellac on a pile to hide the lack of any unique content of value. It's print marketing idiocy that has no place on the web, and no matter how fine a sheen you polish it to, the end result is still just bug excrement on horse manure.

    There's a reason I advocate progressive enhancement as a design and development process; one that alongside quality on-topic professional writing reveals the PSD jockeys under the DELUSION they are "web designers" and the majority of know-nothings claiming to specialize in SEO for the ignorant nubes or outright scam artists they really are.[/i][/i]
     
    deathshadow, Apr 19, 2019 IP
    Mr_Kumar, malky66 and mmerlinn like this.
  3. Mr_Kumar

    Mr_Kumar Notable Member

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    #3
    Wow! What a reply!! I never expected such a response.

    To me, you sound like quite intelligent because you are the one who uses his common sense. I like almost every point you made, especially those points which are showing a mirror to so-called SEO experts. Good one, bro. Thumb up!!
     
    Mr_Kumar, Apr 20, 2019 IP