Daniel Silva asked me to comment on the SEOing of his site http://www.silvaheeren.com.

First impressions:

• His home page is about his firm. Who cares? Remember the world’s favorite radio stations WII FM – what’s in it for me? I would totally swap the site around and put services first and foremost and the ‘about us’ page as a footer nav.
• Light gray text on white background is difficult to read, give that more contrast.
• Links into the content are grouped at the bottom and not in the text where you’d except.
• Terms and conditions looks to be a contract – I would remove this as its irrelevant to someone visiting your site.
• Your portfolio pages look nice, why not use Ajax to replace the screenshots instead of refreshing the screen? Shows you know how to do some of the more modern programming techniques.
• No Web 2.0 on this site – comments, blog, reviews, videos.

So far no SEO comments, and that’s deliberate. SEO is as much about usability of a site as about minor tweaks to rank it. If the site is unusable then even if you have people land on your site they will not convert, therefore your SEO effort is wasted.
So as for the SEO:

• Revisit your keyword research and found out what people are searching for. Your site links are ‘brochure’ which is vague and could mean anything. ‘Travel Brochure’ is more descriptive but probably not a good term either. How about ‘brochure design’.
• Your portfolio pages contain minimal text, as spiders do not read images you need to add text to tell them what is on the page.

I ran it through sitecara.com and got the following errors:

• Code:1265: Robots.txt – No XML sitemaps defined.
• Code:1831: Both www and non-www URLs returned http code 200 – page found. (http://www.silvaheeren.com/ — http://silvaheeren.com/).
• Code:1480: No H1 tag on home page
• Code:1501: Too little text on this page – below 300 words. (179).

In addition I ran it through CSE HTML Validator and it had a lot of HTML errors, none major but should be fixed anyway.

Next steps:

• Address usability
• Re do keyword research, pick 10 or 20 terms you want to rank for. Add a localization to it for now i.e. instead of ‘webdesign’ use ‘webdesign miami’, smaller set of searches but more chance to be #1.
• Re optimize your site.
• Download CSE HTML Validator trial edition and validate your HTML. http://www.htmlvalidator.com/
• Add your site to Site Cara and run the site audit, fix any issues found.
• Add your keywords to Site Cara see where you rank now.
• Go out and get some links (a whole article in itself). Most web designers gain links from their client sites in the footer, these can really help.