A Five Point Guide

Selection Strategy

A search engine friendly website is basically a website with a lot of text that is structured and informative. Try to choose a web design company that is aware of search engine optimization techniques and avoid those who are not or use a strategy or a technique that is not compatible with the search engines. What does this mean?

1. Beware of anyone who offers you a quick fix, i.e., guarantees you a top ten placement in all the search engines within a month or two. For one thing this is impossible. For another, it is not easy to make a website search engine friendly and informative. Choose a company that will only promise you an increase in visitor traffic and that this takes time and a lot of hard work.

2. Avoid companies that concentrate only on the appearance of the site and nothing else. Appearances are important, but try instead to look for a company that gives the content of your site the highest priority and is serious about content development that targets what people are searching for. You can have the best looking website there is, but what's the point if no one ever sees it?

3. Avoid web designers that are only concerned about building a website and rarely mention anything about the search engines. E-commerce or cart websites that use dynamic pages are famous for this. While designing the website is a crucial step, the promotion of that site is even more important. Knowing all that there is to know about the inner workings of the search engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, who is buying who, which engine should you pay to be included in and so on is crucial for having a successfully promoted website.

4. Try to avoid features like flash introductions, flashy animations, pop-up windows and the use of frames. While flashy technical features and beautiful graphics can be appealing, not only are they 1) expensive and 2) time consuming, they are also 3) slow to load, 4) they drive away customers and 4) hinder attempts to promote the site. Try to remember that not everyone has a high speed connection to the Internet. Your best customers might the ones with only a dial up connection.

5. Choose a design company that is actually interested in your product or service, that is willing to learn about your business and thinks about helping your customers make an informed decision. Avoid any company who concentrates exclusively on things like chasing a search engine's algorithm, meta tag development, etc. They often make the mistake of ignoring the informative content of the site and not thinking about the customer. Even though meta tag development is an important tool, it is targeting the right keywords and the content of the website that has to become a priority.

Making The Right Choice

When you are ready to choose a web design company make sure that they are prepared to create content that is informative and targets the right keywords. It might be a bit much to expect a web design company to be an expert in search engine optimization, but they should at least know someone who knows about content development and search engine optimization. The optimization of your website should at least include these five things:

1. A Keyword Analysis and Content Development
2. Industry and Category Research
3. Meta Tag Creation
4. Manual, Automated and Paid Inclusion Submissions
5. A Linking Strategy

This should get you off to a good start.

Developing informative content that targets the right keywords, and tells your visitors what to look for in a product, is a neverending process. It will involve extensive research into the subject of the website and a good web design company should be willing to inform themselves about about your business and be concerned about meeting the needs of your customers.