Webmarketing123 Search engine optimized site development

A website that looks great and is easy to navigate is a must. When designing the look and feel of a site it’s important to approach the design focused on making it a pleasure to look at, easy to navigate, and easy to make a purchase, fill out a form, or download a whitepaper- whatever it is you want a visitor to do.

Once that is done however, the next step is to incorporate search engine optimization, or the art of making the site attractive to the search engines.

There are only 10 results on the first page of Google for your best search terms. How are you going to differentiate your site in the eyes of the search engines in order to get your site to page 1 of the search results and gain that traffic? A proper SEO site design recognizes that the search engines evaluate a site much differently than a human does.

Important do’s and don’ts in creating a search engine friendly website.

Lots of keyword rich content
The search engines must see and adequate amount of html content on your site with the appropriate number of instances of your keywords (the search terms on which you want your customers to find you). This is referred to as “keyword density”.

Do not over-use Flash, PDFs or images
Search engines cannot read anything but text, so if your site is all Flash or all images it will be virtually invisible to the search engines and will not achieve rankings on your keywords.

Be careful about “Dynamic Pages”
Have you ever noticed that some sites’ pages have very long urls with lots of question marks and equal signs? These are called dynamic pages and they tend to be less visible to the search engines. It is important to build adequate content into the site that does not have dynamic urls. There are many ways to achieve this, ranging from tools that automatically re-write these urls so they are search engine friendly, to manually re-writing the urls of certain key pages.

More text, less code
Most of the style elements of a site should be pushed off into external CSS files, leaving very little for the search engines to see other than the text on the page, which should be keyword-rich quality content directly related to the search terms you want to rank well for.

Header Tags
Header tags are HTML tags that look like <H1>this</H1>. It’s also useful to employ H2 and H3 tags as well. The search engines pay attention to what’s in these tags and give extra weight to keywords in these tags.

Search Engine Friendly Internal Links
Just as the Internet is a web of sites linked together, your site must be a highly interlinked web of content pages.
Search engines follow links from one page to another all throughout your website in order to find all the pages to include in their index. If the search engines cannot find the pages of your site with your keywords in them, they have no reason to rank your site well on your keywords.

Conclusion
Hiring a designer that is knowledgeable about search engine optimization and carefully hand codes your site is a big advantage and shouldn't cost more than other designers. Search engine optimization services are indeed separate from web design, but a professional looking site can also be search engine friendly.

Whether you are starting a new project or looking to improve search rankings for an existing site, feel free to request a quote and we'll provide you with a no obligation estimate to get the project done right.