Search Engine Optimisation - Friday, July 25, 2008 8:39 - 0 Comments

SEO Design

We get lots of questions regarding SEO Design or SEO friendly web development. People are more and more interested in getting things right from the start and want to know what good seo design means.

There are a few key points when making a Google friendly website. What does Google want? Firstly Google needs to be able to read what everything is on your website quickly and in an organised fashion. There is a process that Google follows when they come to a site and the easier it is for Google to navigate your website and find as much of this information as possible the better.

There are two halves to seo friendly web design, like yin and yang, and you need to balance the two for a site to deliver maximum benefit. On one side you have Google who you want to keep happy so you get lots of the other side, visitors. You need to satisfy them to make make from your site.

So your website needs to be easy for Google to navigate but not look weird for the user. Lots of keywords stuffed in somewhere for example will look dodgey for someone looking for your serviceor product. Often the best result is achieved by keeping it simple. Give the visitor clear concise information in a clean easy to read format. They come, they find what they want to know quickly and they are happy. The same can be said for Google. When Google arrives you want it to be obvious to Google what it is you do.

The content on the website is one of the most important things. Google is costantly searching for what it thinks is informative, fresh (up to date) content. The phrases you want to be found for must be mentioned here and there throughout your copy and in places where Google will want to see them.

One important thing is to keep Google on your site as long as possible. With so many squillions of websites outthere, when a Google spider is at your site, you want to keep its attention as long as possible. It is the same as any time you want to convince someone of something, the more time you have to explain to them your point of view, the better chance they will side with your point of view. Internel linking helps to keep Google busy on your site and getting as many of your pages indexed as possible. Footers that link to other pages, anchor text, and other methods help with this.

Of course the tas and titles also need to be precise. These are your chances to explain directly what it is you do, and to show what all your photos and other things Google can't read actually are.

If you want to get a website built and you phone any web development company and ask them if their websites are Google friendly, one hundred percent they are going to say yes. If they say no, you will hang up and they will lose the sale. It is not possible for them to say no. I know, i used to say it to people years ago too.

The fact is, they are more interested in the visitor than Google. Which is fine. That is their job really. There is so much they can do onpage to make it Google friendly, but unless you are going to pay them to be responsible for your ranking, it is not possible for them to invest all of the extra time required.

There are companies of course that offer web design and dedicated seo, these guys should be proactive in every part of your seo from the beginning of your project. There are only a handful of companies in Australia that I would trust to build me a great website and also bring it to the top of Google. And most of them are very expensive, overpriced actually. Having said that i am sure there are smaller companies out there who do that consistantly, I just have not met them.

A good Seo company will overhaul your website to suit the latest SEO design requirements as best as possible. So if your designer has made your site and it looks nice and everything works you should be happy. It is then up to the SEO company to deliver the rankings.

My advice depends on your budget. If you can afford an expensive website, get a pro company with good graphic design skills and pay them to make the site, just avoiding to much flash. thell them you will get SEO done on it after so they know your goals. When it is done, thank them and move on to the SEO company of your choice.

With a smaller budget, see if an SEO company will design a website for you. Making a simple to navigate, modern clean website is not very difficult and they will give you the best possible chance to rank highly on Google quickly. Many of the small websites we build in the finance or utility industries for example find their way to the top few pages within weeks for targetted phrases.

Last but not least, if it is the traffic that is important, register a domain name that contains your most important keyphrase, or one suggested by and seo that will help achieve your goals. It helps speed up the ranking process a lot and your site will have a higher resale value when you sell or close your business.

I hope this post on seo design has been helpful. There is way too much advice or info to fit into one post so if you want to know more just ask any questions here and i will try to answer them in more detail for you.