SEO’s prevalence can be maddening. Recently, a client’s design firm questioned our methods and suggested that they not implement our strategy. From the client’s point of view their concerns seemed valid, especially since the designer lists SEO as one of the services they offer. They suggested that below the fold copy with lots of keyword phrases is borderline black hat.

First of all, we only suggest an ethical search engine optimization strategy. Successful organic SEO needs keywords to be used within the copy, and it needs to be readable. Our objective is to get more leads for our clients. By combining an effective SEO strategy with good SEO copywriting techniques, we can bring people to the site and help convert them.

So, was that last paragraph readable? It has lots of keyword phrases. Although that paragraph is a bit aggressive, it is not even close to black hat. Maybe our client’s designer felt that actually using keywords is black hat?

I was surprised by their suggestion that below the fold copy is a problem. (”Below the fold” is any part of a page where you need to scroll down to see it). The location of the fold is determined by each person’s screen resolution. If your monitor has a high screen resolution, you can fit more on the page.

Suggesting that search engines don’t like below the fold copy is ridiculous. Search engines (and the spiders they use to crawl your site) don’t have a monitor and, therefore, do not see a fold for copy to be below. This argument also implies that people are either fooled by scrolling down or that they don’t like to scroll down.

And that’s where their hidden agenda is illuminated. As “usability experts”, the designer apparently feels that anything below the fold ruins the design. They don’t like to scroll down, so they assume that the rest of the world should not be required to scroll down either. When I look at their site, I see limited scrolling, limited copy and limited rankings on the search engines.

The client did the right thing. They sent us the concerns and let us address them. It’s important to understand where your advice is coming from.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under search engines, search marketing, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.