A lot of website design companies claim search engine optimisation as part of their product mix.  Now I can understand the desire to build brick walls around your clients to keep them close - but to claim that you can perform a service as demanding as search engine optimisation and then demonstrate how ineffective your skills actually are is just bad business.

From the client's viewpoint, a lot of people think that web designers are now more SEO savvy than a few years a go (after all this is what they tell them).  This may actually be the case for a lot of them, but we see examples every day where there is still a need to get us involved earlier in the web design process to prevent some real screw ups.

Take a look at this site for a marketing company (names blurred to protect the ignorant):

This is their home page.

How bad is it?  Let me count the ways:

1. It is a splash screen - it provides no real content and asks that you click on an "ENTER SITE HERE" link to actually get to the content.  From a user's point of view - why?  From an SEO's perspective - it provides no real content on your most important page (your home) page for the engines and requires an additional click to get to the rest of the site - a click that means other "root level" pages are now potentially considered less important than this one.

2. The title of this page is actually - "splash".  I kid you not.  The page title is one of the most important tags in HTML at your disposal for SEO - and it has been wasted completely.

3. The only actual text on this page is "We are always available to discuss your individual business requirements - Like you, we communicate 24/7" - that's it.  Here's what Google actually indexed on this page:

4. The images should be named better and have ALT tags.

And so as you can see - this is a shocking waste of a home page and will yield virtually no benefit from the search engines based on its on-page structure.

This site has other problems that I will review in another post.  But please take away the following if you are a web designer or a client working with a web designer:

1. Don't use splash screens - the statistics against their use are staggering - 85% of people will not click through beyond the splash screen.  The tend to serve no purpose other than demonstrating some sort of graphical design prowess (probably not in the case of this site).

2. Name your images - use keywords if you can.  This will become increasingly important in the new world of Google's Universal Search.

3. Use the Title tag!!  This is one of the most important elements.

4. Search Engines index text.  Your site needs to have some text on it to index - it can be placed "below the fold" to make sure that it doesn't interfere with the visual design of the site - but text trumps pretty graphics in the search engine results world every time.

More to follow.