You see, it really depends what your business is, what sort of web design you get, and what sort of web hosting. The quality of these things can vary a lot. If you are running what is basically an offline business, this could be the answer.
You need the design you want
Let's start with the design. The design of your website needs to be compatible with your business, and should be designed to load fast, with small graphics, and should be easy to navigate. These are essentials. You may find that some firms offering free website design just offer you a selection of template to choose from. This is not good enough. You want to be able to choose any practical design you want.
By practical, I mean anything that can be done with web design tools. For example, the only way to have a circular or hexagonal box on your site is to have an image designed to that shape with the text you want on it. You can't just make boxes of this shape with normal text editors.
Choose your own design
You should be able to scan the web and find the sort of design you like, and either choose your own logo or use the one you already have. You should not be limited in this way. In other words, if you getting a free design there is no reason why it should not be a good design.
Of course, the design should be designed to suit the search engines, with the correct title tags and meta description in the head. And it should be able to include all the information you want.
What you don't want
A warning about the design: make sure the design is not based on frames, which used to be common, nor on Flash, except for some isolated images. If you have a lot of products, you can use a database to call product information up, but as these are dynamic pages they are not liked by search engines. The solution is to include a number of static pages.
Next, you need to consider the hosting. Does this allow you to have the number of pages you need? Are there any limitations on bandwidth - that is a measure of how many people visit your site? And can you upgrade at no cost or little cost if you exceed your bandwidth?
Finally, this sort of service is best for people who run offline businesses, but need an online presence and are not really conversant with the techniques needed on the web. Get these points right, and you will find a free website design with hosting can pay.
Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it's certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it's the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.
How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?
DESIGN CAN'T BE IGNORED
If you have an existing site, you've probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you've allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.
The reasons for doing so are valid, and can't simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you correctly understand some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.
And, you aren't alone if you have this disheartening thought-If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it's so stale and boring I'm even embarrassed to send people there!
There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.
Since chances are that's not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.
DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB
that's not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer's attention in 5 seconds. It's pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.
Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it's not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you're offering.
Sadly, it's very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You'll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, "pumpkin bread recipe."
From a design standpoint "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.
There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).
To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.
SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.
Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn't use CSS. Search engines don't like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that "extra" code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.
Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It won't read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.
Both John Hartley & Stall Aroz are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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