Website Designers' Big Mistakes - keyword inclusion

Gordon Bennett - New York Times journalist, so I am told by my temporarily resident aunt, who is breaking the back of turning the house into a habitable domicile after 5+ years of it not being by sanding, painting and scrubbing - it all puts my efforts to shame. I digress....

Why, oh why, do website designers insist on spending weeks coding up an e-commerce site with full functionality, preparing it for launch, and only then come to the Web PR people? Today, I have battled with a live website, trying to get some SEO and user friendly features on to it.

Keywords? Pah! Barely a one in sight, or in site. "Did you ask the client for a list of keywords before you began?"
"No, they said they'd write the text."

Yes but, guys, the keywords don't just go in the text. That's the whole point.

So, armed with my own list of keywords, painstakingly gathered over the last few hours by indexing the client's own site, searching Google for their competitors and nicking some of theirs, Wordtracker, Google Adwords, Overture etc, I am now working through page titles, META tags, alt img tags, filenames, headings and of course, the visible text, to try and put in some of the keywords that are vital to getting this site found beyond the single keyword phrase the client and designer thought was all that mattered.

Then there are the missing calls to action, the lack of interactivity, CRM, content and all the other things that are required to put a halfway decent Web PR strategy together.

If you are a site designer, or know one, tell them that before they start designing anything, all those important keywords need to be built into their process. Every filename should be keyword rich, and hence every HREF tag, every image needs a keyword rich alt img tag, every heading needs to include keywords, etc etc. Let alone METAs and all that bog standard SEO stuff.

Because after all, those keywords are what your visitors searched upon in the first place. When they arrive on the site they want to know WIIFM (What's In It For Me) and that they are in the right place for they want. And that they haven't just landed on a site whose designer thought a bit of black hat SEO would do the job.