4 ways to tell that a web design company DOESN'T know how to optimise

It still amazes me how many 'web design' companies there are out there who claim to offer professional SEO services. Having spent the last four years working in, and advising on SEO, I've seen a lot of 'must do' things come and go.

'You should add this to your website' or 'Everyones doing this today' trends come and go but the core principles of SEO haven't really changed since SEO first started (more on that in a later post). Given that SEO has changed very little from its fundamentals, I'm still shocked to see that some companies can't even do the basic right.

Here are four tell tale signs I've picked up which show that these companies don't (really) know what they are doing when it comes to SEO. Be warned!

1. Keyword stuffed page names
   I've always thoughts that having keyphrases and keywords in page names has always been a sensible thing to do. If you've got a page which sells blue widgets, then it makes sense to call your web page blue-widgets.html rather than product13.html. After all, you want your page to be found under blue widgets, the page has good content on it mentioning blue widgets, so why not call the page name blue-widgets?
   However, when you see SEO companies calling their pages web-design-seo-ppc-online-marketing-england-uk-services.html, alarm bells start ringing. A page name should be short and concise and not some mess of phrases and words stuck together in the hope that somehow Google will come along and put them #1 of the pile for the random selection of words that no one will ever type in.
   
   
2. TITLE tags stuffed with keywords
   As with point #1, too many keywords in the wrong places sends out the wrong message. It has been widely rumoured for along time that less is more with TITLE tags. The W3C recommend 64 characters, and if you look at Google and other search engines, they only show a similar amount of text on the searh engine results pages (SERPs). If your TITLE is too long, then you get the dreaded ... at the end of your nice blue link on the results page. Why ruin your chances of getting that click from the search engine with irrelevant words stuffed desperately into the TITLE tag? I see this quite alot from some of the web companies in the UK and its always very disappointing.
   
   
3. Blocks of text stuffed with keywords
   Adding the words that you want to be found by your searchers (your key phrases/words) into your pages is obviously a sensible thing. A search engine is never going to rank your page under the phrases that you want if you don't mention the phrases on your pages. But search engines are clever beasts and know when content is well written and when it is obviously trying way too hard to try and get Google brownie points. Even Matt Cutts (who is THE PR man for Google) say to avoid keyword stuffing. If Google say it's bad, it's bad. Don't know what I'm on about? Look for something like this:
   
   We sell blue widgets to companies who want blue widgets in the UK. Our blue widgets are the best blue widgets available and we sell blue widgets in many places. We sell blue widgets in london, manchester, liverpool, birmingham, nottingham, leeds, exeter, sheffield, glasgow, bristol, cardiff, norwich, wigan, oxford and many other places. When you buy blue widgets, make sure you get your blue widgets from us!
   
   
4. No Internal links
   When a website has a reasonable (say, 20) pages then it makes sense to link the pages together so that users can find their way around the website easily. Links also help search engines. Websites which have lots of links pointing to them nearly always do better than those which don't. One of the things that good SEO companies will do is link internal pages together, as this helps the cross linking of pages and strengthens the website. Getting links from other websites is never easy, so why companies don't get links from other pages on their own website seems like missing the fish in the barrel. This should be one of the first things that SEO companies do and yet many don't seem to know or bother.
   

There are other signs that show that supposed SEO companies really don't know what they are doing but these are the ones which disappoint me (and also make me laugh). When hiring an SEO company make sure you check out the websites which they have worked on to see if they've committed any of the faux paus' highlighted above.

For a more comprehensive list of things which influence ranking in good and bad ways, read the SEOmoz search engine ranking factors list.

If you've got any more you'd want to add, please feel free to add them below.