We know where the web has taken us in such a short amount time. Remember when you needed to find the local pizza shop? You just went down to the phone booth and rip out the page from the Yellow Pages. That was then and this is now. Now we go to our good friend Google without having to leave the comfort of our own home.
Websites in the 90s were mainly built as a business card. One page: names, numbers, and address. Then at the turn of the century we began to see functional websites becoming more and more mainstream. Let your visitor interact with the website. Unfortunately 95% of these sites have content that search engines can not see. If Google can not see your content Google can not index your content and therefore it will never show up in the search results.
Enter in the idea of a Search Engine Friendly Web Design. This is a design and coding philosophy that allows the creation of a website that will not only appeal to the consumer or end user, but also be structured in a fashion that search engines can easily index.
There are numerous benefits of designing your website to be search engine friendly. Consider a company who can provide not only a website design package at a competitive price, but one that focuses not only on a professional website design but a search engine friendly design as well. This will set a strong foundation for your website to achieve a higher ranking in the search engine organic results, generating more traffic, and at the same time having a professional and elegant appearance.
The higher your ranking is within a search engine the more visitors will shop up to your site. This is not an 'if you build it they will come' scenario, with millions of sites and blogs launched DAILY your site is not a drop in the bucket, it's a drop in the ocean of the world wide web. Why should the search engine rank your site higher than any other?
Having a search engine strategy not only makes sense, it's becoming a necessity to all new and old websites a like. The right content and keywords is not enough, the density of keywords, the proper coding techniques, meta data, header tags and placement, all play a critical role in your search engine success and really is just the tip of the search engine friendly web design iceberg.
Let's briefly talk about what a search engine does and how it works. A search engine works by using spiders or robots that crawl through the various web pages across the Internet. These robots grab keywords on each of the web pages and 'index' them within the search engine's massive databases. When a user initiates a search, the robots will grab the web pages indexed containing the words within them. This means your website needs to have the appropriate keywords to pull up your products and services. But that's not all, they have to be in the right position, surrounded by the right code, at the right frequency. This is where most web design firms fail, they think only of the appearance and not of the effect it will have on the search engines.
Even if you have a high volume of traffic to your business you may suffer from poor sales or conversions. How could only 1 visitor in 1,000 convert? This could be due to attracting the wrong audience of people to your site. A search engine strategy would show you exactly what needs to be done to target the intended audience. Often times less traffic – if high quality – will bring in more conversions and generate higher revenue than a high volume of poor quality traffic.
It is important to have a professional build your website when you want to optimize for search engines. The key is in creating a professional website design with the right content in the right places.
Good luck with your project and much success to your web endeavors.
Mike
