Proper search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of every web marketing strategy (or it should be) but many times optimizing a website is seen as an afterthought to design when a company is trying to revamp its website. When it comes to designing a website that will be optimized from the get-go, it is essential that your company’s marketing team be involved from conceptualization straight through to launch. Why is this? Well that’s where we come to of part 1 our biggest website redesign mistake with regards to SEO.
Part 1: Leaving your website’s SEO until the website is already designed.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sunburnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for trying to implement SEO once your website has alrady been designed and built.
When your SEO is done properly, it helps you to determine the type of content that should be present on your site to help it rank well in search engines from the time it launches onwards, and, realistically, you shouldn’t be designing a website if you don’t know what content will be on it, right? Now, we’re not saying that you should design your website specifically around the keywords you’ve determined it will be easier to rank for during keyword research. What we’re saying is that determining how your customers find you and what they are looking for on websites in your industry is an important step in determining what content will be present on your website, and, depending on what kind of content your site needs to appeal to your target audience, your design will probably change to reflect that. This might sound like a relatively straight forward idea, you might even think this is a no-brainer, but you have no idea how many times we’ve seen companies come to us looking for some SEO consulting help, only for us to realize that they’ve built their entire website without once taking SEO into consideration. They have essentially built their website on a weak foundation. In addition, there is always the danger that if your website designer has no experience with SEO, then they won’t have designed or built your site in such a way that you can implement optimization tactics successfully without paying them for further development.
Part 2: Having your design firm do your SEO for you.
What is Google Caffeine? 
So what was BP's reasoning behind this? According to a spokesperson for the company, they purchased these terms in order to “make the information on the spill more accessible to the public.”
Since implementing this strategy BP has come under some harsh criticism for their tactics, and many critics feel that their choice was unethical. Many search engine marketers are questioning whether trying to control what the public finds when they search for information on the oil spill is just a reputation damage control tactic, rather than a way to inform the public about the oil spill itself, especially since many non-technical web users may not realize the difference between paid listings and actual organic news results.
As of this morning, the ads seem to have been taken down (see below). Does this mean that BP has decided they no longer want to “make the information on the spill more accessible” or are they merely crumbling under the pressure they are receiving for their questionable methods?

No matter what their reasons for buying the ads in the first place (or taking them down) it seems pretty obvious that their latest venture has done little or nothing to improve the public’s opinion of their brand.
Personally, we think that BP should start taking the advice of their fake BP PR Twitter account which has already garnered over 100,000 followers.
If you'd like to read some articles on this subject we suggest you look at the resources below:
Fox News - BP Manipulating Search Results on Google, Critics Accuse
ABC News - BP Buys 'Oil' Search Terms to Redirect Users to Official Company Website



We just finished this week's web marketing webinar on SEO and we received some great feedback and quite a few questions. We were unable to get to all the questions during the course of the webinar so for those of you who didn't get your question answered, we've chosen the most frequently asked to answer below:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best opportunities that companies have to generate high quality leads for their sales teams. Unfortunately, many organizations are committing one (or many) of these common mistakes without even realizing it.
We got some great feedback from our last search engine optimization (SEO) webinar, "Live Website Assessment" so we decided to present another webinar on SEO basics and bring Jeff Hall, one of our marketing consultants back to present again.