Seo Web Design Tips
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Search Engine Friendly Web Design and Marketing
Search engine friendly web design may not be a term you are familiar with but it is something you should be aware of.
The majority of people on the web use a search engine to find services or products and if your website is not search engine friendly it can’t be shown in the first pages of results.
There are aspects of the design of a website that make it search engine friendly and you should ensure that your web designer is aware them. These include things such as not using frames (because information inside them cannot be read by search engine spiders/bots) and not having too many internal and external links on a page (restrict it to under 100). There should also be a good number of words on a page because images don’t tell Google and Yahoo! etc enough about what your page is relating to. Because they give results based on relevance to a search query, they have to know what your site is about.
If the design is working against you, you don’t have much hope of internet success.
When you have a website that can easily be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots/spiders, you will start to be listed in the results pages when web users type in a query that matches what your site is about. Bear in mind that there are many thousands of pages of returned results and most people only look at the first few. If your site is languishing in position 500, the liklihood is that no-one will find it so you must market your site.
You can market your site both on an offline because both methods will help with awareness of your site and your services/products. When advertising in print or on TV or radio, don’t forget to add your website URL.
Internet adverting is usually angled towards Google because it is the most significant search engine and there are two marketing strategies you can employ to appear on it.
The first is by using Google AdWords (often referred to as PPC or pay-per-click advertising). Using PPC, you pay to have an advert appear on the site (payment is only due when a user actually clicks on your advert). It is a good method to make sure your website appears quickly on Google, but the drawback is that as soon as your budget runs out, your ads cease showing and so you lose that online visibility. AdWords is simple to use but requires plenty of background reading to get the most out of it.
A longer term strategy is search engine optimisation (SEO). It involves improving on and off-site factors to promote a website in the search engines. The goal is to get your site ranking well in the unpaid search listings (rather than the paid sections where you would show in AdWords). Web users are more likely to trust the organic listings more, simply because they’re not paid-for. Organic search result rankings are calculated using Google’s secret algorithm of more than 200 factors. It should be noted that AdWords use does not affect natural search results so you don’t have to use AdWords to do well in Google’s organic listings.
If you can afford it, it is a sensible idea to use both AdWords and SEO to improve your online visibility and brand awareness. Ideally you should use a specialist marketing company as their knowledge will lead to a more effective campaign and keep you away from potential pitfalls such as having your site de-listed by Google for using so-called ‘black hat’ SEO techniques, or wasting your AdWords budget because you didn’t utilise negative keywords.
You may find that your web design company is able to offer search engine marketing services too which will be beneficial to you because the whole build and marketing of your site can be done within one company. Because the best results come from a partnership, and your design company will already know you and your company very well, this may be your most useful option.
If you are searching on the internet for a web design company e.g.inputting ‘web design Wiltshire‘, you may find it also worthwhile querying phrases such as ‘SEO web design Wiltshire‘. Just because a web design company doesn’t show up for ‘SEO web design’ though doesn’t mean that they can’t do it. The best thing to do is to ask.
Whatever approach you take with your website design and marketing, don’t forget to keep the search engines, particularly Google, in the forefront of your mind.