What are the advantages for a Website Designers utilizing SEO?
Do you feel that as a web designer, it is important to know everything about SEO? Surprisingly you will find that many web designers know very little about Search Engine Optimization. Often people associate SEO only with online marketing. If you are a web designer you most likely love to create wonderful, artistic designs for your clients. For a web designer the best portfolio is of course, their websites. So wouldn’t you think it would be valuable to create websites that are optimized and easily found in search engines?
A web designer is going to deal with the majority of the frontend development and a lot of the on-site SEO will fall into the responsibility of the designer and developer. SEO is important for people to find your website without having to directly type in the URL. When your website/websites are not easily found you are risking losing thousands of viewers per day. For example, let’s say you average 500 visits a day from direct traffic only, and imagine that with search engine visibility, you now receive over 2,000 visits per day. What if out of 500 visitors per month, 10% of the visitors were valuable leads, meaning 50 visitors were interested in your services. After the utilization of SEO you begin to notice a boost of traffic resulting in 2,000 visitors per month, taking your 50 leads up to 200 valuable leads per month. Of course this is not an accurate example; however it is evident that if your traffic increases with “relevant” traffic, your conversion is most likely going to increase as well. With search engine optimization you can gain an increase in traffic that is equally relevant to your previous traffic, higher conversions, and more sales and greater visibility for you business.
Basics of a Search Engine
A crawler-based search engine, for example Google, has its own algorithm and process for crawling and indexing each website. The Web crawler will crawl the website pages collecting information and data from your websites content, and then follow the internal and external links, and depositing the information in a database called the index. As a web designer, you are going to want to be aware of the factors that search engines place high importance on in regards to relevancy. Ultimately, you want to rank high for each factor to ensure that your website will be displayed in the top results for your desired keywords. It is important to recognize common mistakes that cause your website to rank low in searches.
What are the Designers, Developers and Online Marketing Roles in SEO?
It is important to understand the difference between On-Site SEO and Off-Site SEO. On-site SEO can be anything related to the HTML, Navigation and internal Linking, Site Map, Image Sizes and Website Loading time, Alt Attributes, Keywords, and etc. The off-site SEO includes link building off site through article submission, blogging, commenting, and way to build back links to your web page. So whether you are a designer and developer working on the on-site SEO or you are the Online Marketer working on the Off-site SEO, you want your SEO to be intertwined and relevant for your targeted audience as well as visible and ranked high in Search Engines. You will find that it is best to have the same person design, develop and optimize your website for search engines.
Common on-site SEO Mistakes made by Designers and Developers
Some designers will not optimize the keywords within the content. For example often times you will come across an anchor link to that says “Click here”, “Read More”, or “Learn More.” This is a prime example of missing an opportunity to link back to a page with a relevant keyword. So say you want your reader to “Read More” about your website design services you could always create content saying, “Read More about our Website Design Services.” This is only one minor mistake out of thousands of missed SEO opportunities. Now you can see the importance as well as the detailed knowledge that one must utilize in order to fully embark on good, strong, solid Search Engine Optimization Strategy.
Another Common mistake made is with Title Tags and keywords. Often times web designers and developers miss the opportunity to optimize the Title tags for each Page, Page URL’s, the Main headings on each page, the first paragraph of content on each page with keywords and the body of text, alt attribute for image tags, and etc. Often times there are broken links that are not identified; there is poor internal linking and navigation, no sitemap, etc. These are all some of the basic examples of common mistakes that web designers and developers make. Here is a great article on Common Mistakes of Web Designers and Developers in regards to SEO.
An SEO conclusion for Web designers, Web Developers, and Online Marketers
Stop first and examine your website for common mistakes. Take the viewpoint of the audience when designing your website. First ask yourself, is the information presented clearly and easy to navigate? When you begin to think like the consumer or targeted audience you can soon realize simple mistakes in design and development that may frustrate a potential customer. Search Engine Optimization is designed in such a way to connect the right people to the right information. You want to your information to be relevant, clear, and to the point. Make it simple and relevant and notice that not only will your traffic increase, but also your bounce rate will decrease leaving you with higher conversion and happy satisfied customers.
Here are some helpful resources to learn more about SEO: SEOMOZ (Great resources and SEO articles), Google’s Blog (Covers a wide range of information in regards to Google, SEO, etc.), Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (Great Resource for Understanding the Principles of SEO in Regards to Google’s Algorithm), and Search Engine Land (Great Search Engine Articles, Blogs, Forums, etc)
Although SEO is overwhelming at first it is important to know the wonderful outcomes it can provide for your businesses website, customers, and sales. Magic Logix is a Dallas Web Design Company that focuses on solutions for businesses wanting to utilize their Website Design, Website Development, SEO and Online Marketing to as a marketing resource it was intended to be. A website is not only a great tool for businesses to market their services online; it is also a great way for online merchants to manage their ecommerce websites through secure database applications, CMS, CRM, etc. At Magic Logix we believe that website design should be professional, website development should be validated and error free, and that SEO and online marketing should be relevant to the target audience that you are trying to reach.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Going Back to the Basics of High Quality Web Design
From a webmasters prospective, you want your website to be easily found and indexed by search engines, in order to rank well and reach your targeted audience. Google, for example pays attention to Quality Guidelines that highly focus on usability and relevancy. A website should be a clear, relevant online description of who you are and what message you have to offer the user. A clear definition and navigation is important to those who want to learn more about your company. Each page on your website should be reachable to the user and should be represented by a clear hierarchy and text links. One thing to remember is to make it simple and easy on the eyes. You do not want to over stuff your links on one page. Be practical and strategic on how you organize your links.
Your content should be organized as well. Too much content can be overwhelming and sound fluffed up with useless content, while too little of content can leave the user confused with no understanding of who you are and what message you are trying to convey. Some people will provide limited content to entice the reader to fill out a form to inquire more information. In limited situations this is ok, however be careful to not mislead the user or put irrelevant content that leads to your landing page. Let us go back to the basic of high quality, professional website design by reviewing a few basic key components.
• Company Name and Logo
First of all the user will want to know who you are, so it is important to make this clear on every page. It is always important to have your name and logo one each page to remind the user who you are and to embed the brand into their thinking as they navigate through your products and services.
• Home Page Link
Have you ever come across a website that has completely horrible navigation? One good sign of horrible navigation is the inability to find your way back to the home page. The only page that should not have link back to the home page is the home page. Make sure you check for broken links and incorrect HTML.
• Search and Site Map
If your website contains a large amount of information and a ton of pages, sometimes it is nice to include a Search Feature within the website. This allows your user to quickly find what they wanted to learn about your company. Sometimes just a search feature alone can make or break a sale. Always keep the user in mind; they will remember this when viewing through your services.
About Magic Logix
Magic Logix, is a digital marketing solutions company that provides services in Professional Website Design, Website Development, SEO and Online Marketing. The company utilizes open source development to design and integrate customized CMS for online business management, web applications, as well as customizable ecommerce websites for online merchants. By combining high quality web design and online marketing, Magic Logix offers businesses highly customized, fully functional websites that are designed and developed for Search Engine Optimization. To learn more about Magic Logix web based marketing services please feel free to visit http://www.magiclogix.com.
Your content should be organized as well. Too much content can be overwhelming and sound fluffed up with useless content, while too little of content can leave the user confused with no understanding of who you are and what message you are trying to convey. Some people will provide limited content to entice the reader to fill out a form to inquire more information. In limited situations this is ok, however be careful to not mislead the user or put irrelevant content that leads to your landing page. Let us go back to the basic of high quality, professional website design by reviewing a few basic key components.
• Company Name and Logo
First of all the user will want to know who you are, so it is important to make this clear on every page. It is always important to have your name and logo one each page to remind the user who you are and to embed the brand into their thinking as they navigate through your products and services.
• Home Page Link
Have you ever come across a website that has completely horrible navigation? One good sign of horrible navigation is the inability to find your way back to the home page. The only page that should not have link back to the home page is the home page. Make sure you check for broken links and incorrect HTML.
• Search and Site Map
If your website contains a large amount of information and a ton of pages, sometimes it is nice to include a Search Feature within the website. This allows your user to quickly find what they wanted to learn about your company. Sometimes just a search feature alone can make or break a sale. Always keep the user in mind; they will remember this when viewing through your services.
About Magic Logix
Magic Logix, is a digital marketing solutions company that provides services in Professional Website Design, Website Development, SEO and Online Marketing. The company utilizes open source development to design and integrate customized CMS for online business management, web applications, as well as customizable ecommerce websites for online merchants. By combining high quality web design and online marketing, Magic Logix offers businesses highly customized, fully functional websites that are designed and developed for Search Engine Optimization. To learn more about Magic Logix web based marketing services please feel free to visit http://www.magiclogix.com.
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