A website that looks great and is easy to navigate is a must. When designing the look and feel of a site it’s significant to approach the design focused squarely on making your site a pleasure for visitors to navigate – that’s goal #1 in web design. Once the design has been approved and your web designer goes off to turn the prototype into actual HTML code, there is a second aspect of web design that should not be forgotten – search engine optimization services (SEO) is the art of making a site easy for the search engines to navigate.
The Importance of SEO in Web Design
According to a June 2006 survey by Netcraft, there are now over 80 million websites on the Internet. In fact, the number of sites is growing at a faster rate all the time, due in large part to increasing numbers of services that provide ‘cookie-cutter’ or ‘template’ sites for free or very cheap.
As you embark on creating or upgrading your website, how is your site going to attract visitors over all those other sites? There are still only 10 results on the first page of Google for your best search term, how are you going to differentiate your site in the eyes of the search engines in order to gain that traffic? A proper SEO design is a critical first step.
Most people realize that a custom site can have a huge advantage over template sites such as a Yahoo! store or something built with an online site builder. However, many web designers still create custom sites that are visually appealing to a user, but not very friendly to the search engines. If you choose the wrong web designer, a custom site could actually be LESS search engine friendly than a free site might be. So how can this be? Why are there still designers out there creating websites without even a first thought about how the search engines will react to it?
1) They Are Not Aware of SEO
Many web designers are simply not aware or not concerned with optimizing a site for search engines. These are usually old-school designers that are all about the user experience. Of course the user experience is important, but there’s nothing that says you can’t have a great user experience AND get great search traffic from the same design.
2) Popular Web Design Tools Ignore SEO
If your web designer uses a popular web design tool such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage to make sites, be aware that those tools pretty much ignore SEO in the HTML code they generate. These days the best designs from both a user and search engine perspective are achieved through hand coding HTML and CSS. Yes, it requires a designer knowledgeable in those technologies and may sometimes cost a little more, but it is always worth it. The bottom line is you shouldn’t skimp on your design now only to pay for it in poor search rankings or increased SEO costs later.
3) It’s Not a Web Designer’s Job
Some web designers feel that SEO optimizing the site they create is outside of their job description. They may say that it’s the job of an SEO firm to optimize the pages, and in some ways they are right. However, completely ignoring search engine readability from the beginning can make it very expensive, if not impossible to go back later and create the nice lightweight pages that search engines love. Make sure your site is optimized from the start, so you don’t have to pay someone else to go back and do it again the right way.