First, ugly sites are often sites that were originally built back in the 1990s by some business owner who had no web design sense or technical knowledge but wanted to promote his business online. It was much more difficult back then to actually sell online (not many shopping cart scripts existed, and ones that did exist were very expensive). So the business owner didn’t just install a cart and sit back and wait for orders to roll in. Rather, he put valuable and unique content on his site. Over the years, he added and added and added more and more content, and garnered lots of link love, and now his site is very well aged and very well linked.

The MacGregor Sailboat site is a good example of this. It was built by Roger MacGregor himself, who designed the MacGregor sailboat and who owns MacGregor Yachts. It’s a horrible horrible site from the perspective of design, usability and navigation. It does all of that completely wrong. But it’s packed chockful of everything you ever wanted to know about the MacGregor, and MacGregor owners love that site.

Second, ugly sites are often sites that were built by hobbyists — people who are simply passionate about a topic, and started their site without any intention of making money from it. Before eBay, before CJ, before AdSense, these hobbyists were out there creating volumes of good content about their topic of interest.

They, like the business owner above, garnered lots of link love, and today have well-aged and well-linked sites. Perhaps they’ve added AdSense or affiliate links on their site, and now they realize some hefty income from their hobby site. It’s icing on the cake for them; they didn’t start the site to make money, and if the money dried up they would continue to maintain the site. They didn’t know or care about design, and they still don’t. But they offer some of the best resources for information about their hobby. Non-profit organizations often fall into this category too. A Page About Freemasonry is a good example of this type of site. It was created by a guy who is a Mason and who loves Masonry, and wanted to share information about it. The site is nothing special, design-wise, but it contains scads of good info about Masonry.

Third, ugly sites that are ecommerce sites are often built by small business owners who can’t or won’t pay a professional to build their site. They use whatever free software they can get their hands on, and they do it themselves. They care deeply about their business, but they have no clue about web site development.

These sites can do well because the owner’s personality and passion very often shine through loud and clear. People get a sense for how much the owner cares about his product and business, and so they trust the site enough to buy from it despite its lack of professionalism and design aesthetic. These sites are often created by business owners who are very active within the community of people who use their products — so they’re known within the industry, and people feel comfortable buying from them.

AmmoMan is a good example of this type of site. My word! I would never deliberately design an ecommerce site to look like that! But lots of people who shoot know AmmoMan is a good place to buy ammunition, and lots of shooters have met the owner at various shoots and gun shows over the years.

So…. yes, ugly sites can do very well. But in my experience, whenever I’ve taken on a client with an ugly site and redesigned it, it did better than before. My redesign will typically also improve search engine crawlability, usability, navigation, etc., so it’s not an apples/apples comparison. But it provides evidence that ugliness, by itself, is neither required nor sufficient for a well-performing site. When ugly sites perform well, it’s typically not because of their ugliness but in spite of it. People are very forgiving of ugliness when the site gives them the information they couldn’t find anywhere else, or sells them the product they need at a better price than they can get anywhere else.

The bonus? Most of these recommendations also help your site comply with W3C HTML/XHTML standards, as well as improve accessibility for the disabled.

Title tag: Yes, this one’s a biggie. All indications are that the title of the page matters a lot to Google and the other SEs. Every page on a web site should have well-written title that accurately summarizes the page’s main focus.

Description meta tag: Yes, it matters, in a sense. See here.

Keywords meta tag: No. Google ignores it. I’ve seen evidence that Yahoo finds misspelled words in there, but that’s about it. I use it, because it can be useful during development to help me focus on the keywords that should be on that page. Plus if it ever does become useful, all the sites I’ve developed will already have it. It doesn’t hurt, unless you use it for keyword stuffing.

Headlines and subheads: Yes. There’s evidence that headings and subheads are given more weight by the search engines when they’re enclosed in appropriate heading tags (i.e., h1, h2, etc.). Using a page’s primary keywords in well-written headings and subheadings semantically correct header tags also has the advantage that visitors frequently scan a page, and they’ll see your most important keywords in the headings. And the headings don’t have to be big and ugly: there’s no SE penalty for using CSS to style the headings so that they complement the design of the site.

Image alt text: I don’t believe that alt text in any old image makes much, if any, difference to the search engines. But it’s likely that appropriate alt text in images that are used as links are seen by the SEs as the anchor text for those links. The alt text likely doesn’t carry as much weight in SE rankings as real text links, though; it’s too easy to abuse. It’s a good to include alt text anyway, to help ensure the site is accessible.

Valid code: Not important per se to the search engines, but important for other reasons. Invalid code could interfere with search engine indexing if it’s so badly malformed that the search engine bots simply can’t parse the page.

Bold/strong: In two of his videos, Matt Cutts specifically mentioned the bold and strong tags. The exact wording of his statements suggests that text enclosed in bold and strong tags are likely to carry more weight for ranking purposes.

Internal linking and navigation: A hearty yes. Plain vanilla href links, with appropriate anchor text, give weight both to the page with the link and the page being linked to. Javascript links, Flash links, and (egads!) Java links are of no value. Links within a site distribute PageRank within the site, so the navigation structure and other within-site linking plays a big role.

External links (links to other sites): I dunno. I’ve seen plausible arguments on both sides. If external links help, they probably don’t help much, because anyone can plaster their scraper site/MFA site with links to authority sites. My own opinion? I think that if the sites being linked to are quality sites, and if other signals of quality are present, that external links can help. We know that external links to “bad neighborhoods” can hurt, Matt Cutts has told us that in so many words. My recommendation: If the external link is good for your visitors, go ahead and include it.

Keyword density: No. Well, sort of. There’s no definitive percentage of keyword density, no magic bullet. But logic tells us that overdoing it will end up making a page feel spammy. And unless you’re Adobe or George Bush, it’s probably impossible for a page on your site to rank well for a keyword or phrase unless that keyword or phrase appears somewhere on the page. My advice: Do the keyword research, then write for your users. If your writing is on topic, the keywords will put themselves where they belong, for the most part.

Good content: Yes, yes, and yes again. Valuable, well-written text that gives your users what they’re looking for, whether it’s a specific product and product specifications, or the history of the blue widget. In the long haul, there’s no substitute.

SEO includes everything from the technical configuration of the server hosting a web site, to the site’s coding and structure, to the visible content on the pages, to the development of incoming links to the site from other sites.

The server needs to be set up so that it properly serves 404 page-not-found HTTP responses for invalid requests. If Virtual Hosting is used, the Virtual Hosts must be defined and configured properly. Any redirects in the .htaccess or httpd.conf file need to serve the appropriate “file moved” response — usually a 301 permanent redirect. Other directives in the configuration file must likewise be set up so as not to cause problems for the search engine spiders, or bots.

The underlying code on the page must present spiderable content to the bots. Occasionally when a client comes to me for help with their site, I discover that every single internal link on the site is a javascript-generated link. These links look just like standard href links to the client, but for the bots, they might as well not exist.

Keyword research needs be to done, to explore the range of possible keywords and phrases and their relative value for search targeting, taking into account the estimated number of searches, the level of difficulty in attempting to rank well for those searches, and the probable success of those searches in bringing targeted users to the site who are likely to turn into customers.
Titles must be custom-written for each page. The title must be optimized for the primary keywords the page is focused on, and must also be written with human marketing in mind, since the title is what appears as the bolded, clickable link in search engine results pages.

Visible content on the pages must be optimized for the search engine bots and for human visitors. Content must also be worthy of linking to. Link development is often viewed as “off-site optimization,” but what’s on the site is critical for this off-site optimization. You want links? Why should anyone link to you? Because of what your site offers, that’s why.

Headlines and subheads are best presented as text, despite the aesthetic limitations inherent in HTML. Using CSS to style headlines helps there. Many sites do well using graphical images as headlines and including appropriate alt text for the image, or using technical methods to show the pretty graphical headline while feeding the text to search engine bots, but it’s my opinion that nothing beats POT (plain old text) for all headings and subheadings on a page.

A good SEO professional understands all of these issues, and many more. Canonicalization issues. Duplicate content, and the appearance of duplicate content. Internal linking structures and practices that let the spiders know what the most important pages are on the site. Semantically correct code that uses h1, h2, and h3 tags appropriately for headlines.

One site may lend itself to SEO improvement by simply adjusting some of the underlying code, or the visible text on the page. Another site may require a complete overhaul to fix deeply entrenched problems. SEO is not an aftermarket add-on that you bolt on to your site after it’s complete. Good on-page SEO is built into the site from the ground up.