WEBSITE DESIGN SEO: BUILDING OPTIMAL WEBSITES
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The reality is that most websites in use today are not designed to perform well on the search engines. Why? Because most people who designed websites had little or no real knowledge of what the search engines look for or where they look. The Google™ algorithm alone changes hundreds of times a month and most designers are satisfied enough to produce a nice looking website with Dreamweaver®, FrontPage®, and the like. Many businesses are to blame when they look for a cheap way to “get a website up” and ask little nephew Jimmy to do neat things with his computer. The bottom line is, most people simply don’t understand search engine optimization (SEO) and fail to include website design SEO as a component of their design and management process. Once you understand what most of the businesses at the top of the Google™ search results already know, but don’t want to share, you too can become a strong presence on the web.
Building for Two Audiences
Most websites are designed with only the customer in mind. This is fine, but if they can’t find you via the search engines, you may simply have a great looking billboard in a cornfield. Websites designed with SEO mean that you have a designed website that will openly “court the crawl” of the search engine spiders, who are sent out to read and index your website. In order to do this, you need to create a solid and easy flowing roadmap of strategically placed SEO keywords and phrases, headers, tags, site maps and navigation for the spiders to follow and index. Since many of these elements are blind to the naked eye of the end-user, they are most often overlooked by both end-user and the designers.
Useful Websites Outperform Sexy Sites
One of the most important aspects in SEO website design is to write in a language that the search engines can read and people want to read. Sounds simple, right? Well it’s not when all people want is the coolest website on the web. Most of the websites you see with active graphics and moving parts incorporate Flash® technology or JavaScript™ to make this wizardry happen. The challenge is that some of these same Flash® and JavaScript™ designers create the whole website in these technologies (graphics, page layouts, navigation trees, site maps) and search engine spiders have nowhere to go because they cannot read it! This makes about as much sense as putting Chinese language instructions in all the toys sent to the U.S.
So what is more important: having a website that looks cool or one that people want to use? Think about it another way; one of the keys to your success is to build lots of links to your website. What better way to build lots of links than to create a site that others find useful and ultimately want to link with and share with others! Will a sexy graphic on your home page do this any better than building a really helpful page? Think about it before you decide.
Structure Your Pages Wisely
One would think this would require no explanation but after looking on the web at many poorly performing websites, you will see what we mean. SEO website design means websites designed in a manner that are intuitive, easy-to-read, and with a desired customer in mind. This means that websites should have a simple navigation tree, be no more than three to four pages deep from the homepage, and allow users to quickly access what they were looking for. A typical optimized website will have around a 3 to 1 ratio of pages read per visit, which indicates that most people know where to go when they land on the home page of your site. The higher the ratio for high content websites, the more value your site is typically providing your users.
Understanding Your Customer’s Journey
Why do you want people to come to your website? Hopefully, this is a question you have answered by this point; but you would be surprised how many people who have websites cannot immediately answer this simple question. Why? Because it is often left out when a website is initially designed. If you want to sell a product online, you may want customers to buy it at your website. If you sell a service, you may want customers to contact your website to use your service. If you sell products or services locally, you may want people to easily find your website, get directions, and even research your products before they buy them at your store. These are all potential journeys your customers can take on your website, journeys that you need to consider when you design your website. If you want people to buy your product from your website, how many clicks and pages are you putting in the way of and/or supporting this result? If you are selling a service, how much content and how many pages do I need to read through to understand your service? Where do I need to go to contact your business through your website? If I have a plumbing leak that is flooding my house, do I really want to leave an email about my problem? These are all issues that help determine the ideal customer journey through your website and should greatly impact how your SEO website design strategy takes form.Tweaking and Tuning
As much as we would all like to admit we got it right on the first try, the reality is that businesses grow and change and so should your website. Even the largest companies in the world have discovered new customer journeys when new products and services are offered and new technologies are introduced. Prior to mapping software services, store locators were not part of the journey consideration for retailers. Prior to shopping carts and eBay, selling directly online was not a service offered for most companies. The trick is to understand your ever changing customer needs and the technologies they use. More importantly, you need to track and analyze customer patterns and trends through your website. Most of the popular analytics tools such a Google™ Analytics offer free website reporting capabilities with only minor changes to your website. Hosting companies also provide these analytical tools along with your hosting services.
The challenge for most companies who have web analytics is that they don’t know what they are looking at and what is truly important. This is where an SEO consultant can come in handy. When you know what you are looking at, you can learn a lot about your design, where your customers are coming from, and how to design the best customer journey and results from your website. SEO consultants tend to look at these on a daily basis and typically can tell you more in a few minutes than the average person can see in hours of detailed analysis.