It’s a pretty common thought that SEO and Flash live on two different planets. If you want to have a great site that ranks organically, you can’t have Flash. If you’re some fancy artist whose SEO potential is limited, you need a flash site to show your flair – because the artistic potential of HTML is limited.

Martin Luther King said “I have a dream..” and I will say the same. We don’t have to segregate these two functions, and in fact, they can both enhance one another in positive ways. Read More

One of the most critical errors businesses make is ignoring SEO in the initial web design process. Many of these errors can be covered up or improved slightly, but large gaffes in design can cause long term traffic loss and a quick path to an unsuccessful business.

Sometimes web designers can consider themselves proficient in SEO, but still miss certain areas in the design process, or not want to interfere with design dreams of the businesses they are creating a website for. As a business owner, it is important to keep every step of the web design process in mind and be knowledgeable about it when thinking about your own perfect design.
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What Consists of an SEO Friendly Web Design?

When you optimize a web design you are optimizing for the search engines, but you are also creating a web environment that is meets the needs of your visitors.

Pleasing Your Visitors

There is a basic list you need to implement in your web design:

• Easy Navigation – do not make navigating your site difficult at all. Some people do not know how to look, they do not want to look hard and some of your visitors will have physical and/or mental disabilities. For example, if your users have to see a particular color to find the navigation you could be eliminating any color blind visitors to your site. Make the navigation simple and make sure any visitor can use it without problems.

• Scannable Content – this means creating headlines that people can scan to see if your page has the information they are looking for. People always scan, so create headlines that describe the paragraphs. This way you allow readers to quickly find what they are looking for and once they start reading you have an opportunity to sell your products or services. Additionally, you should use keywords/keyword phrases in your headlines for optimization. Headlines are a crucial part of any web site.

• Content With No Spelling or Grammatical Errors – This may seem like a no-brainer, but there are so many business web sites with errors that make them appear less professional and trustworthy.

• Understandable & Informative Content - no one is an expert in everything. You may think that everyone knows the proper way to plant a palm tree, but in reality the majority of people coming to a site selling palm trees would have no clue where to start. You have to write content that is easy to read and in a non-condescending way explain everything point by point. If someone is an expert in your field they will skim past the things they already know, but someone that is looking for the services you provide is seeking to understand the process and gain confidence that you know what you are doing.

• Be Congruent – you want your pages to be similar in design/organization. If every page is different the visitor may get tired of looking or get confused and leave.

• It Should Load Fast - no one likes to wait for a page to load. We have all been to sites that take a long time to load and what do we do? Say, “forget it” and back out. Pictures can really mess up your loading time. Use a program like Photoshop and try to shrink the size of the picture, but try to maintain the quality of the picture.

• Follow W3C Suggestions For Accessibility – W3C.org has some testing recommendations all webmasters should follow to ensure your visitors have complete access to all areas of you site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are some very important things SEO does for a web site and without them a site will not do well. An SEO Friendly Web Design will:

• Make the site easy to find on the search engines

• Adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

• Appear in the SERPs for relevant keywords and keyword phrases

• Include the right amount of optimized content, as well as optimized headlines and meta tags

• Have clean code for the search engines

• Be crawlable- search engine spiders and bots should be able to smoothly move through all of the pages on your web site

• Avoid content in frames

• Be W3C compliant

• Use anchor text effectively

• Interlink relevant pages throughout the site

• Have a sitemap with text links to every page

In Conclusion

An SEO Friendly web site design should please all web site visitors; this means those that have complete knowledge about the subject of your site and those that know nothing about the subject. It should also meet guidelines set by the search engines and be properly designed for search engine spiders/bots. Most importantly, your web site should be easy to read and navigate

Redesigning isn’t rocket science but it could easily become a huge disaster, leaving your website in a worse state than it was before. You can avoid this with the proper knowhow and planning.

1. Focus On Audience
Make sure the website is easy to use. Keep in mind that a visitor needs to be able to easily navigate through your website to complete the sale. If you’re selling a service, the visitor needs to be able to find the service that they are looking for, find information about it and easily be able to contact you. The best visitor is a returning visitor, so make sure a visitor’s experience is great.

2. Set Goals
A successful redesign takes time, careful planning, and thorough testing. Sometimes you don’t even need to completely redesign your website. It may have an excellent design, but be impossible to navigate through. Remember: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. You will need to establish long term goals and short term goals. The short term goals serve to help you work up to the long term goals so that everything can be tested after each short term goal is achieved. The last thing you want is your website’s traffic and/or conversion to decrease. So before you do anything, figure out what is wrong with your website and why are you redesigning it. Is it outdated? Does it have a low conversion rate? Or is it just not ranking well in search engines?

3. Analytics (Tracking) Software
Web Analytics is one of the most important things you should have before you even think about redesigning your website. Analytics software allows you to track your visitor, know where they are going and what they are doing. This will give you the answers to the questions asked earlier. It will give you a reason to redesign your website, whether it is to make your site more search engine friendly or to increase the conversion rate. Google Analytics is now free for everyone. It isn’t very user friendly, but hey…it’s free.

4. Define Technical Goals
Before you even start redesigning, make sure you know what you will need for your new website to work. Will you need to back up daily? Is your existing server going to cut it? What if the server crashes? Can you make changes to the website yourself? What language is my website going to be in? Is it going to need a content management system? Figure out what you will need to redesign your website, how long will it take, and who will be making these changes. This will help you estimate the cost and time for this project.

5. Website’s Future
This is one of the most forgotten steps in redesigning a website. Don’t just think about now, think about the future. This way, the next time you want to update your site, it can be as painless as possible. Also know that your website will need maintenance. If you are selling a product, make sure it is easy for you to add more products in the future and that they have the same design as the rest of the website. If you are selling a service, make sure it is easy to add or change it.

6. Usability Testing
After every step of the redesign have visitors test the usability of your website. Maybe what you thought made the website better, actually made it worse. Test every step of the way to make sure you get the best conversion possible. Make changes to your plan according to your visitor’s reaction. This will not only increase your conversion rate, but increase you returning visitors as well.

7. SEO
Search engine optimization will be what drives traffic to your website. It is important that you research your keywords, optimize your coding (keywords in URL, H1, H2, and in the title, good meta description) and comply with any other search engine guideline. If you are spending all this time and money to redesign your website, you might as well put in a little more time and money (or effort if you are doing it yourself) to have it done right. Be careful to have a proper balance between search engine friendliness and usability. After all, a site with 1000 visitors with a 15 percent conversation rate has the same number of customers as a site with 5000 visitors and 3 percent conversation rate. What’s more important…more customers or more visitors?

Google Analytics for Local Search - Tracking Traffic from the 10 Pack: http://bit.ly/9KTj22 ~View This

The Way I SEO: http://bit.ly/aOlPRb /by @rosshudgens ~View This

SEO, A Love Story: http://bit.ly/96HhwV ~View This

@technolotee the single grain hoodies and track jackets look great!!! ~View This

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