Site design does still matter.
What do not matter are the old tricks. But, the site needs to be spiderable by the major search engines. Google and others can now read plain text in flash, which is huge. Beyond that, best practices need to be followed. 301 redirects for sites that need them, alt-text for images and flash, easy flow between pages, and good use of Meta Tags.
Wait? Meta Tags? Isn’t this one of the abused tricks that was deep-sixed with the black hat junk in part 2? Well, kind of.
The Title Tag and Meta Description are biggies. We were recently brought in for a consulting gig by an agency to review a big client’s new site. No Title Tags and no Meta Description. Oops. That is like walking out the door without pants or a shirt. Most likely not something you want to forget since they are, in most instances, the first thing everyone will see.
Speaking of Meta, let’s say you do a search for “Google” in Google. What you’re reading is Google picking up your Title Tag and Meta Description.
So, Meta Tags are not nearly as powerful as they once were, but the rest of the Meta family, and their honorary member the Title Tag are vital.
