Something of a rarity, this husband-wife team designs beautiful web sites that rank well.

Name: Miriam & Liam Ellis-Loraditch
Aliases: SEOIgloo
Single or Married: Married
Kids: None
Home Site: Solas Web Design
Memberships: cre8asiteforums
Contact info: info@solaswebdesign.net

How did you get into SEO?

Basically, getting into SEO came naturally to us. Our orientation to web site design has always been to make things as simple as possible for users. As it turned out, this dovetailed nicely with making things as simple as possible for the SEs. One fine day, we discovered that there was a name for what we were doing: SEO, and that there were richer and deeper levels one could get into with this with the proper education. We’ve spent hours, and will always spend hours, studying how search engines work and how to please them.

What other areas do you specialize in? How do they compliment your SEO efforts?

Miriam had a background in adult education - mostly teaching obscure foreign languages, so her content writing skills are quite good. This has been a big help, particularly when a given client isn’t comfortable with their own writing skills.

Miriam has also won awards for her fine art, so her creativity when it comes to the actual visual design of a site is pretty intuitive and strong.

Any favorite projects you’d like to share?

There have been a lot of great projects this year, in particular. One we’re feeling really good about right now was for a flower and vegetable seed company - 2B Seeds. An ideal client, really, because of their authority in their field. Their family business pioneered hothouse tomatoes, so they are extremely knowledgeable. But, their original site was full of Flash, not user friendly, not ranking anywhere or making sales. Within months of the redesign, the difference has been astonishing.

They’re ranking at the top now for many of their seeds, the sales are coming in. The next seed season, we feel, is going to be a great one for them, and we’re enjoying being webmasters for this company. We love the thrill of watching what we do make such a difference for the small businesses we work with.

What part of SEO drives you nuts?

We’d have to say the part about SEO that we find the most difficult is dealing with the misinformation that is out there. Because we work with small businesses, many of the business owners are constantly being contacted by spammy SEO companies who give them the line about needing to fix their meta tags and being submitted to 1000 search engines a month. People get confused by this type of bad information, and then come to us with wrong expectations.

We had an experience where we did a quick redesign of a really nice artisan-related website. We were happy with the design. It was a good start, very search engine friendly. We didn’t hear from the owner for a few months, as it was just a limited contract, and when we decided to go take a look at how his site was starting to do, we were totally shocked. In the interim, unbeknownst to us, a spammy SEO company had contacted him and given him the party line and convinced him that his site was full of ‘terrible flaws’. He paid them to ‘fix’ it and they completely ruined our lovely, clean code, stuffing it with the most absurd keywords and hidden text. Additionally, the bad company had held onto his credit card info and kept charging and charging him every month for goodness knows what. He couldn’t get them to stop. Needless to say, we did damage control and put the site back to the way it was, but we were pretty steamed about it. So, I guess we’d say it’s the glut of dishonest so-called ‘SEO experts’ that we’ve found to be one of the main challenges of working in this field.

What’s your favorite part of SEO?

Getting to pick the projects we’re really interested in is what we like best. Our firm is a little different, because we are using our skills primarily for small businesses - not for the ‘big guys’. Through our work, we have met extremely nice, talented, kind-hearted people. We’re honored that they trust us enough to invite us to be such an important part of their business, and it is pure pleasure to have a married couple, or a stay-at-home mother tell us that we’ve tripled their profits. When you’re supporting yourself and your family, doubled or tripled profits have real meaning in terms of the quality of life the business owner’s family gets to enjoy. Finances are so much more real at the small business level than they are in the corporate world.

Additionally, SEO skills enable us to build the kind of Internet we want, in our own small way. By taking on a client who has a worthy product or service and using our skills to drive them to the top, we know we are giving the public something of genuine value. We only take on family-friendly projects, because that’s the kind of Internet we want to build and promote.

Where do you see SEO going over the next 5 years?

It seems to us that content is going to remain king, and we hope that the basic principles of SEO are going to raise the bar for the Internet in general. Google, in particular, is taking things in this direction, with their demand for quality, unique, useful content. We’re quite glad to see this.

At this point, most of the world hasn’t even heard of SEO. All you have to do is take a look at what’s out there on the web to realize this. But that will change. The demands of the search engines will hopefully generate a more scholarly Internet. As of now, researching a given subject still brings up a lot of very poor quality material, but it’s getting better. We’re hoping to see Google’s higher standards become more universal so that people aren’t just putting up pages just to put up pages. The concept of authority sources is really exciting to us, both as webmasters and as Internet users. So, because the basic concepts of SEO are to make things simple to use and worthy of reading, we see the emphasis on a finer quality Internet growing steadily over the next five years. We’d like to personally thank the folks at Google for this.

Any favorite tips or advice?

I think one of the best things we tell our clients is that they are the authority on their subject. Whatever business they happen to be in, they’ve often got years of experience in that field. For example, we work with a woman who is a beekeeper and she’s the president of her local beekeepers’ association. Her knowledge about the environment, as documented through the life and health of her bees, is truly astounding. She knows things about her work that we, as webmasters/SEOs simply do not know, and so we try to encourage our clients to start mining their own minds for information that they have that will be beneficial to impart to others. This makes for excellent content. It’s the real thing - not junk.

Additionally, we strongly feel that all website design must be SEO-based, from the ground up. We do a great deal of re-design work, because so many websites are simply not built to be search engine friendly. We educate small business owners about this whenever possible.

How has SEO benefited you the most?

In our personal lives, SEO has been something of a blessing in that it allows us to have the lifestyle we not only want, but actually need. Miriam has some environmental health issues. She can put in a ten hour day in our home office, no problem, every day of the week, if need be. She’s really rather unstoppable. But she needs the comforts of the home office to keep her going strong.

Neither of us are corporate-minded people. We like working directly with real folks and many of our clients have become friends over time. This makes our work life very pleasant, and free of the stresses our more corporate counterparts must face each day.

And, being webmasters/SEOs enables us to have a wonderfully flexible schedule. If half of our time is spent sitting at computers, the other half is spent outdoors. We’re avid birdwatchers, and working in this field enables us to put in an afternoon chasing birds when we want to, knowing that we can come home and work at night. Or, we can work all day and head out for a night of owl watching if we’d like to. This flexibility is something we are constantly grateful for, as it seems a more natural way of working to us. Being tied to a rigid schedule doesn’t always engender the best quality of work. Rather, we believe that consistent creativity is more possible when the worker has ample time to rest, to relax, to get inspired.

What is it like working with your spouse? How do you divide the duties?

It’s lovely being able to work together. It means we live full time in the same world - not in two separate ones. It also means that we talk about work a lot! The nice thing is that neither of us ever has to worry about boring the other one with too much talk about work. We’re always on the same page with what is going on in our work life and in our personal life. In a way - working together makes work a big part of our marriage.

We admire and need one another’s abilities. We both code, and when we’re at the start of a new project, we’re sitting side by side at one computer, developing the design of the site. But once we’ve got the basic outline ready, we tend to work separately, but simultaneously.

It usually breaks down so that I’m doing the bulk of the nitty gritty coding while Miriam develops graphics and writes content. Her communication skills are very valuable to us, and she tends to do most of the one-on-one talking with our clients. She spends a part of each day talking on the phone or answering emails, and it’s because of her that I think our clients come to feel that we are their friends as well as their business associates. So, in general, I think my best skills are in powering through a project, tweaking code, getting things done, meeting deadlines, and I think Miriam’s artistic creativity and thoughtful turn of mind are what she brings to the table. We make a good team.

What industries do you work in?

Though we are the webmasters for a few higher-level projects, for the most part we make ourselves available to what people call Mom & Pop companies. The industries are extremely varied. Home & garden, handcrafts, science-related products, Gourmet businesses, local service industries etc. We love being contacted by someone way up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia who creates handmade furniture because that’s what his father and grandfather did. Projects like this delight us, and nothing pleases us better than to be able to use our skills for small companies like these.

The unifying factor in the projects we take on tends to be the superior worthiness of whatever the company is doing. These are the people we want to work for. We want Mom & Pop to make a strong comeback via the Internet.

Do you take jobs or just work privately?

We do some of both. Most of our business at this point comes via word of mouth from our current clients. We’ve recently started accepting some International clients - small businesses in Australia, Canada, etc. and this is very neat.

What is your SEO Philosophy?

Think like Matt Cutts! No - seriously, our SEO philosophy, in a nutshell, is to begin any project with the intention of making it as fine a resource as it possibly can be. Avoid bells and whistles at all costs. Keep things absolutely simple. Being fancy doesn’t pay.

We like to approach web design from what we call an ‘Atari 2600 mind set’. We’re 70’s kids, and our wood-paneled Atari 2600 video game system is still going strong. Modern video games make us dizzy and don’t strike us as being any more appealing to play than Adventure was (you know, you’re a dot, fighting dragons, winning the glowing chalice). Its ultra-simplicity makes it easy to use, comfortable - something you want to revisit.

Now, obviously, we’ve come up a little bit in the world from the sprites of the old days, and we like our websites to be clean and welcoming, but the attitude is the same. And, in terms of SEO, aim to please your human visitors with a sensible structure and written content that teaches them something interesting and new about your area of specialization. Sure enough, the Googlebot will like it, too!

You make such beautiful sites, what is your approach to design?

Thank you, Rand. That’s very kind of you to say. As we’ve said, function will always be the #1 priority with us. But, thankfully, web design does go beyond the rudiments of getting a customer to click on a link and purchase something with ease. We get to set the tone of where business takes place. At the outset of a contract, we make sure to speak in depth with the client about their personal style. Are they a high-powered sort who’s going to want that corporate blue/grey/white look? Or, do they want their site to make people feel like they are in a garden that’s a charming little place to buy handmade wind chimes? Sometimes, it’s a pretty intuitive thing. We listen carefully to the signals the client is giving us about their vision of the business. Some clients communicate very well and leave you in no doubt as to what they want. Others hurriedly warn you that they’ve never thought about colors or moods in their lives and they just want you to do whatever you think will be best. This latter type of project tends to be the most fun, artistically speaking.

Inspiration comes from everywhere. Miriam’s fine art has won juried shows, so her sense of balance and color were very developed before she started doing digital design. We also quilt together, which is a very graphic art and revolves around the moods that different colors create when you piece them together. So, though our websites tend to have similar basic structures, we’re always trying to think of some neat element that is going to make the visual impression different and appealing to the visitor. Just this week, we needed to get some fresh air during work and decided to take a walk down our road. We picked some leaves on the walk, came home and scanned them and implemented the scans in a project we’re working on. The client was absolutely thrilled. You just love it when you get those emails that are titled - WOW!!! I LOVE IT!!! It’s exactly the reaction you’re hoping for, but visual taste can be pretty subjective, so there’s always that little waiting period after you’ve sent a mockup to a client, not knowing whether they will approve it or not. It’s so gratifying when they leave you in no doubt about whether they are pleased. And we really appreciate it when our clients pass on to us that they get compliments about their websites. It lets us know that we must be getting it right.

Anything else?

As webmasters, I think we are all in a somewhat unique position. Miriam and I live in a rural area, 20 minutes outside of a small town. When we were children, most of the businesses in the town were family-owned. The shopkeepers knew their customers, and because their livelihood depended upon it, they stood behind their customer service and products.

As adults, we aren’t happy with the strip malls and franchises that have replaced nearly all of these businesses. As we see it, the Internet is offering a sort of reprieve from this state of affairs. We like to shop locally, and when we shop on the Internet, we like to patronize small businesses. We know that if the product isn’t what it should be, the owner will readily replace it, and will speak to any dissatisfied customer promptly and directly. This is a world apart from being processed through a system where the business owner has no identity and the customer has no identity. We know for a fact that people of our parents’ generation feel this difference, too, and our mothers, in particular, get very excited when they find some neat little business on the Internet offering exactly what they were looking for. They become loyal customers.

The reason I say that SEO-oriented webmasters are in a unique position is that, at this point, there aren’t really all that many of us, relatively speaking. We get to choose which businesses we will promote with our skills, and because of this, we have some small power to shape the Internet we are creating. It’s a subject we’d like to hear more discussion on, particularly regarding the moral and ethical implications this has for the individual webmaster/SEO. Would you do SEO for a company that’s polluting the environment? How about one that displays harmful attitudes toward women or children? Do you want sites like these to rank well and win traffic? What kind of Internet do you want to build for the future?