In SEO you will run across two types of sites. There are those which may have been designed in a way that is no longer being used and others where the design is an ongoing project. Both can be good and bad points but only one will have an advantage when you are dealing with the client.
There are many pros and cons that come with SEO. When the designer is finished completing it you may still find a great deal of structural and design issue that should be revisited. Unless your designer has a great deal of skill when it comes to SE friendly designs, you will be working on a lot of structural issues. The positive side of this issue is that we get to work on the site and the designer wont feel bad when you explain something that needs to be changed.
In another story, when you work with the designer, you will find that the designer will get personally offended when you want to make changes to his structure of your site or he may challenge you about your views on SEO friendly websites. Take for instance the argument that an All Flash Site is more appealing.
The SEO may argue that Flash will not be read properly and will have less spidered content that the search engines will see. The Designer will say that flash is read on Google easily. The SEO will tell them that it doesnt in the same way; you have to maintain that one needs many pages of optimized content and the Flash will not do that. The designer will disagree. However the point remains that the Site needs to be converted.
It is important that the designer understands why it is important to know that conversions are essential, however so is the traffic. The designer will also need to know that if there is no traffic then even 100% conversion will be irrelevant.
However you will sometimes deal with a SEO who knows how important this to the success of the site is. Making the two balance out is a scary task, but when the SEO and the web designer mesh we are talking about an ultimate website. If you have an idea, and it is not working out to be a good solution the web designer may have an idea that will make your site more attractive as well as knowing the problem and helping you with the solution.
Picking a good web designer
The two main things you should consider is that they can build a site that is both attractive and SEO friendly.
Attractive Designs
When you choose a designer you should take a look at their portfolio to see what designs they have made in the past, and get the advice of the people who are in your target audience. It may also be a good idea to see what the leaders in your industry are doing and who designed their sites. Remember just because you like the design, does not mean that it will be good for your target market.
You will also need to know if the designer is good at the conversion optimization skill. You will want to know if they are clear about the best colors to get people to check out your site. They should have done some eye tracking studies which will see how the visitors reacted after visiting the site. You need not be concerned if they dont know all of these things, the information is available so you will know what to look for before you approve the design.
Building an SEO friendly website
This is one of the most important areas that you must address; you will need to have a search engine friendly design if you are going to get the rank you need to be successful. The skilled web designer is going to have a strong knowledge of CSS and will know to put the main formatting into the file. Much too often people are getting a lot of sites with font tags, size tags, and color tags. This process will give the search engines a lot to dig through to find the content that they are looking for. If you have a table based design it needs to be technically sound.
Another thing to be aware of is bad internal links. You will need links on your internal pages to move up on the rank. Most sites try to target certain phrases on the homepage but internal pages will hold specific products and services. To maximize your rank on your internal pages you will need to be found by the spiders and to be associated with the keywords you will need to target.
If your designer uses image and scrip navigation that is okay, because it makes your website more appealing and makes sure that your key pages are being linked to content on the homepage and they can be spidered quickly.
You will sometimes even find some sites that are over optimized. There are designers who will pack in so many keywords that it will be hard to read and it doesnt work for the reader of the site. Your pages need to read like you are writing to your visitor not like you are writing for the search engine. You want your keywords to be in there but you only want a density of about 3% so that it can be read by humans.
About the Author
Moe Tamani is a Dallas Web Designer specializing in SEO Web Design.
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