Building a Website With SEO in Mind

Internet marketing is not something that businesses can afford to just consider any more. It must be an integrated element of your total marketing strategy and your company web site should be the epicenter of these efforts.

Jenny Servis, Vice President of Marketing for marketing solutions firm describes the importance of a company website, “Ten years ago it might have been a choice to jump on the online bandwagon, but now it’s an absolute must to survive and flourish as a business. With over 85% of searches for products and services occurring online, it is simply a “duh” at this stage.”

Folks are also now using assistance from professional agencies to not only design their websites but also make them much more visible in the search engine pages. Myself, the owner of Rygre Digital Marketing, Ryan Green, one of the various Paducah based web design firms out there, understands the significance of keeping Search Engine Optimization in mind when constructing a web site. Only yesterday speaking about one of my recent jobs with another client I said, “When we built them a custom site, we had a lot more control over not just the design, but a lot of the programming that was put into it, and we put a lot of marketing into it.”

It is clear that a web site on its own is not enough anymore and Search Engine Optimization is a big part of the game.

What we know about SEO

Everyone in advertising has heard the term Search Engine Optimization enough times that a definition isn’t really very necessary. The way that it operates, on the other hand, is left up to debate. While some stay steady, some rank variables seem to be in an ongoing state of flux. One thing that is for sure is that SEO can’t be an afterthought as it pertains to your company website. When you are designing, or redesigning, your business web site, SEO must be woven into the plans from the very beginning. Professional web design businesses will insist on having these discussions in the first planning phases and understand this. A number of the things they should have in mind are as follows.

The strategy that is right for mobile optimization

Data suggests that people spend more display time on mobile devices than they do on their computer nowadays so it makes sense that your site be cellular friendly. But which course do you take? It’s possible for you to opt for a dynamic serving strategy that serves up HTML that is different determined by the apparatus the visitor has. Another plan is to make use of a separate URL, such as m.example.com, that directs mobile users to pages made specifically for their device.

If you want to make Google, and the other search engines happy, then you are going to want to use web design that is responsive. With this technique, your site is made to detect the screen size of the visitor’s apparatus and respond to it. Your web pages compress without losing any content and stretch. Unlike the other two strategies, your URL as well as your HTML stay the same with reactive design so there’s no duplicate content by having multiple URLs and the optimization efforts aren’t duplicated or lost.

Easy navigation

Creating a website that’s easy to browse has two benefits when it comes to search engine optimization. First of all, if your visitors have a problem finding what they are looking for they are going to leave your site. This provides your website a higher bounce rate and also the search engines will take notice. If visitors can browse through a site without any issues the search engines are going to recognize that website as one that offers up good information. These metrics are critical in today’s SEO attempts.

Secondly, your site’s navigation has an immediate effect on how easily a search engine spider can crawl your site to find the content. If there are links to every page in your site, the search engines will have an easier time indexing everything your website provides. Think of it this way, if Google can not index a page on your website then it will not show up on the results page so you want to make sure that you do.

User experience

There’s a reason you want to have a professional website designer build your company’s website and that is because you’ll want to provide your visitors a good experience. Let us face it, anyone can fire up their web design applications and get a template to get a website ready to go, yet this strategy is not going to give your visitors what they desire. Caution must be taken to ensure a great user experience is provided by your website by:

• Loading instantly
• Being simple to browse
• Being accessible to all kinds of visitors
• Focusing on content
• Having a clean, well ordered layout

Make your URLs work for you

The best web design firms understand how important the URL structure is to SEO so while they are building your website, they focus on this to give you the most benefit. For starters, your URLs should be readable by people. What this means is that those dynamic URLs that make your address look like www.example.com/posts/id=3432? Need to be averted, and leave out all of the weird punctuation marks. Use real words, really use your key words if possible; simply don’t overdo it. Another thing to consider is that shorter is better so those long titles or folders upon folders aren’t helping your site rank higher with the search engines. You can even leave out the stop words and divide with hyphens or underscores. Eventually, make sure to canonicalize your URLs that host duplicate content using a 301 redirect or the rel= tag that is canonical.

If your website is built with a good foundation using SEO you are going to discover that it is more easy to gain the maximum results from your other optimization efforts. You’ll also be assured that using the best practices when it comes to SEO and you website design will provide you with an evergreen strategy that won’t send you scrambling to make changes the next time Google updates their algorithm.