Search engine friendly web design might not be a term you know yet but it is something you should be aware of.
The majority of people on the web use a search engine to learn about products and services and if your website is not search engine friendly it can’t be displayed in the top results.
There are elements of the design of a website that make it search engine friendly and you should ensure that your web designer is fully aware of them. These are things such as not having frames (because the information in them can’t 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 plenty of words on a page because images don’t tell Google and Yahoo! etc enough about what your page is relating to. Because they calculate results based on relevance to a user’s search query, they need to know what your site is about.
If the design is working against you, you don’t have much hope of going forward.
Once you have a website that can easily be crawled and indexed by the spiders/bots, you will start to find you are listed in the results pages when web users type in a search query that the topic of your site. 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 hiding in position 800, the chances are that no-one will find you 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 offline, don’t forget to mention your web address.
Online adverting is usually aimed towards Google because it is by far the biggest search engine and there are two marketing methods you can use to appear on it.
The first is by signing up for 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 you appear quickly on Google, but the downside is that as soon as you stop paying to appear, your ads cease showing and so you instantly lose that online visibility. AdWords is easy to use but needs plenty of background reading to get the most out of it.
A longer term method is to use search engine optimisation (SEO). It involves evaluating and improving on and off-site factors to promote a website in the search engines. The aim 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 tend to trust the organic listings more, simply because they’re not paid-for. Natural search result rankings are determined by Google’s secret algorithm of around 200 factors. It should be noted that AdWords use doesn’t have any bearing on natural search results so you don’t have to use AdWords to do well in Google’s organic listings.
If you have the funds, it is a good idea to use both AdWords and SEO to improve your online presence and brand awareness. If possible you should use a specialist marketing company because their knowledge will lead to a more effective campaign and keep you away from potential pitfalls such as having your site dropped by Google for using unethical 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 internet marketing services too which will be useful to you because the entire build and marketing of your site can be kept within one company. Because the best results come from a partnership, and your design company will already know you and your company well, this may be your most useful option.
If you are looking on the internet for a web design company e.g.querying ‘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 provide it. The best thing to do is to speak to them.
Whatever you do with your website design and marketing, don’t forget to keep the search engines, particularly Google, in the forefront of your mind.