Search Optimization Web Design
There are two components to designing a website. The first component is designing the website for your business customers. Who do you want to visit this site and what do you want them to see and hear? The second component is designing for the search engine spiders who will never pick up the phone, walk through the door or make a purchase, but they will crawl all over your pages, reading every word on the page and are very influential in determining your search engine placement and ranking for Google, Yahoo and Bing.
It is imperative that the website be designed for your target audience. Is it an old audience, a technological savvy audience, a young audience, an auditory audience, visual audience, an intellectual audience and/or impulsive audience?
Once the audience has been determined, what are your competitors doing that is successful or failing to do. Is there something they are providing on their website that is important that your website also do or are they things you can do to make your site more friendly than the competition. Let us also be aware of the keyword phrases that the competition is using to get found on the Internet and more importantly, what needs to be done to get a higher search engine ranking than them.
Keeping in mind your target audience, when one designs a website one needs to make choices that are going to work. What type of website navigation are you going to choose? Is it appropriate to use drop down menus or should we use a left-hand or right-hand navigation sidebar that doesn’t require “mouse” expertise. We want our visitors to spend as much time as necessary visiting the website and if navigation gets in the way they will leave early.
Once the target audience design needs are met, one needs to think about the search engine spiders. Flash is great for pictures, but if one isn’t careful, they can be search engine spider enemies. Are we committed to being W3C compliant so that blind visitors are able to see your site?
Often times when Forward Opportunities is looking at a customer’s current website, we take a look at the Google cache to see what their spiders saw on their last visit to the home page. Often we find a blank page, even though it is a beautifully looking website from a human visitor’s point of view. Pictures are not seen by spiders and this is important in the design of websites where pictures are telling the story.
Once the design choices are made and the architecture is determined, it is imperative that the website design be implemented so that the search engine optimization of the keyword phrases are highlighted and presented to the spiders in the most effective ways. META Title Tags and META DESCRIPTIONS must be listed prominently. The keywords must be utilized properly on the home page text, as well as with appropriate anchor text on the sending pages and consistent linking text on the landing pages.
Every time you put a hyper-link reference for someone else’
