Website Development and SEO
Increase Web Traffic With the Right Approach
All too often, we see clients who have built cool new websites with all the latest graphic design techniques, Flash and user-friendly features only to be disappointed by poor search engine rankings for their keywords. Poor visibility in the search engines, and in Google in particular, can be a difficult problem to overcome, especially if the site is built without considering SEO upfront – especially at the site architecture level, but also at the page level.
Many website development firms have limited SEO and/or marketing expertise. You can see this clearly in the way they present their services. Instead of presenting a balanced view of the challenges of website development, these firms like to dwell on how strong their design team is and show you the great sites they have designed. A more balanced understanding of these challenges will help you to ask the right questions when choosing a web development partner that will meet your particular needs.
The Balancing Act:
Designing for Humans and Search
The classic tension in website development is whether to design for human visitors, or optimize the site for search engine rankings. We will often hear the opinion that a simple, clean design that is light on meat (body text) and perhaps heavy on sizzle (Flash, animations, sounds) is what people are looking for. And these ideas are not necessarily wrong, especially if the site will attract visitors by means other than the search engines (for example by brand awareness or email campaigns), and the visitors are not interested in finding real content but might instead be looking for entertainment.
However, where the website needs to attract the highly-qualified traffic that only the search engines can provide, a “content-free” approach to website design is folly. A much more successful approach for this type of company would be a well-designed site that balances human factors with SEO considerations. Such a website might, for example, provide the real beef on content-rich pages that will rank well in the search engines while still achieving that clean look and feel for navigation pages whose primary role is to route visitors to the content that they are seeking.
Choosing a Web Development Partner
The implications of this balancing act are important when it comes time to select a web development partner. Ask each prospective partner to show you those sites they have designed which rank well in the search engines and, importantly, which keyword phrases they have been optimized around. If they can't tell you, then you know its time to move on!
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