Does an SEO redesign have to suck?

A lot of the SEO advice you describe sounds like garbage. Remind the client that there are two ways to get to the top of a google search result: 1) Have the definitive site about a subject with a great design, good photography, and a good honest voice that draws people to it as a resource. People will like it, enjoy it, get something out of it, and share it. 2) Have a highly tuned and optimized site loaded dense with keywords, important text highlighted wherever possible, and is coded in a very specific way. All these techniques are to trick search robots into liking your site with no thought to what human visitors may think (which doesn't matter since it's really about the robots). Also keep in mind as Google changes their methods every few months, you'll have to continue to hone your site for their robots. It seems obvious to me which approach is the best way, the easiest way, and the most honest way.

Echoing Afroblanco, the best SEO optimization you can give your site is simple - run it through a "common-sense machine." In other words, use all of the "best practice" rules for designing websites. The bedrock of this is to make your site valid (X)HTML. This alone goes a long way in helping your SEO for a couple reasons: 1) It "forces" you to separate code from design, which makes your code lighter and ultimately easier for search engine spiders to index, categorize, and sort. It's easier for Google to find the content it needs if it doesn't have to sort through blocks of 'code soup' to get to the essential data. So break all of your CSS declarations into external CSS files and harness the power of CSS to do MORE with LESS. Other benefits are faster download and rendering in the browser. 2) If "forces" you to use HTML tags the way they were meant to. For example, nesting header tags properly will help your SEO because it helps Google understand relationships between data, i.e. <h1>U.S. Presidents</h1> <h2>George Washington</h2> <h2>John Adams</h2> etc.. This begins to give semantic structure to your data, because you can infer that both Washington & Adams were U.S. Presidents because their sections are nested under the first header as dictated by the way HTML renders the tags. 3) It "forces" you to design towards greater accessibility - for example, requiring "alt" tags on all your <img> tags not only makes your site easier to use for the vision-impaired, it also helps your SEO. There are many more benefits to making sure your site uses valid (X)HTML, but as you can see, doing so as a first step will improve your search engine score without doing any actual SEO magic. The benefits of having valid code cascade (mind the pun) all the way down and across your site by improving everything from bandwidth, rendering speed, easier-to-read code, accessibility, SEO, and more. All of this should be done regardless of your desire for better search engine scores. Better scores are simply a byproduct of using standard best practices for designing websites. Icing on the cake, if you will. You can validate your code at http://validator.w3.org/ or use the excellent Firefox addon: http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

Having done web-design/development for more than a decade, it's my opinion that a lot of SEO is snake-oil. There are some good firms and practices out there, but there are far more people who are taking advantage of people who don't realize how much guess-work is really involved. I agree whole-heartedly with emmastory. If your SEO firm thinks you have to change the whole design of the site to optimize it for Google (as long as it's not some flash-only monstrosity right now), they're not very good at the technical design / construction and really all they should be trusted to do is give your real designers some tips on ways to make the site more search-engine friendly. Stepping off the soap-box for a moment, understand that the Google PageRank algorithm is a trade secret. None of these SEO people really know what it is. Very few (I've never seen one) have done anything resembling "scientific" experiments to try to isolate or identify even little parts of the algorithm.

This is my approach to SEO : All the gimmicky shit that people try to tell you to do - like keyword density and things like that - is bullshit and should be avoided. In some ways, it's like an arms race. The SEO folks come up with something, the search engine people invalidate the tactic, the SEO people come up with something new, etc. It's a vicious circle, and there's no winning. HOWEVER, there is a very clear way to make your site more SEO-friendly AND user-friendly. Work on accessibility. Anything that makes your site more accessible will make it more naturally SEO friendly. When you follow this path, you'll notice that the folks at Google, Yahoo, etc are actually trying to help you. They are in the business of categorizing content, and if you can do their work for them, all the better. They'll even encourage you to use these"white hat" SEO practices. For example, do you use meta tags? Are your URLs search-engine friendly? Do you use sitemaps? These are only a few things, I'm sure there's more.

Seconding Afroblanco's recommendation. If they're not selling Credit Card Consolidation or Online Poker Deposit Bonuses, then keyword density is much, much less important than just being very clear with the site's navigation, URLs, and metatags.

All helpful comments above, here's a more technical note. Keep the page titles as graphics, if they add to the visual brand and feel. ALT attributes are good to have in place, but not perfect. Layer on top of that a technique in CSS called image replacement. Without going into TOO much tech blah blah blah, the idea is to show the images to visitors, but show actual text to the search engines. assume Welcome to our website (this would be the page header, with actual text in the header tag. No image (yet) Now, in the CSS (doing fast psuedo code here for illustrative purposes) h1#welcome background-image ('file name of welcome page header text image) set it to no repeat text-index -9999 this pushes the text off the screen (9999 pixels to the left, very far!) and replaces the content with an image (the original graphic) people and site owners are happy - they see nice graphics search engines are happy - they see text in an H1 tag, which gives the page a hierarchy and topic. Again, I'm zooming on a conversation level; your (qualified) web developer should be able to understand the details. THat's just one aspect of organic SEO that does not involve ripping apart and starting over or reducing down to an all text site. Hope that helps. Mike T.

I can't speak for the web designers, but as a user, if I click through to a site that looks like it's from the 90s, I tend to assume it hasn't been updated since then and click away.

some very good points were made above, particularly afx114's comment, the stuff about accessibility and others. i totally agree that most of the best SEO is common sense stuff you would do to create a good site and be clear about what your site (and the pages therein) are about. typically this doesn't need to have a huge impact on the visual design of the site, especially if you're using css well. that said, it seems like there's a lot of negativity about SEO firms in general in this thread which seems a bit much perhaps. there are bad SEO firms and good ones, but i don't think there's anything inherently bad about helping businesses/organizations/site owners get found by their target audience. and i'm not an SEO professional, i just find it a bit odd.

There's lots and lots of great advice here, so can I give you some advice about how to present it? Presumably you'll be sending her an email about your thoughts on the SEO firm's proposal, and as I re-read your question it occurs to me that you've already done a great job summarizing your position. Your question is clear, concise, passionate, and shows a true affection for your client. For a designer, you're a pretty good writer. (That was a joke; calm down, everybody.) I'd recommend reworking this post into an email to your client, with additional (short) points plucked from this thread. You have something the SEO firm will never have: a personal interest in how the site does. I'd keep the email relatively short--you don't want to rain an avalanche of facts down on her head--but make it clear that you can tell her a lot more about it if she's interested. And, of course, the way you come at this is important: a screed against SEOs, no matter how well-deserved, could make her feel like you think she's dumb. I think your stance should be "I think it's awesome that you care about helping the site get discovered, but I'm not sure how useful this firm is..." etc.