SEO Web Design that is both search engine friendly and user friendly becomes more and more difficult. Why is this? Well search engines look at the content on a website in a very analytical fashion. Where as a user wants to get the information or service they are interested in as quickly and painlessly as possible. Users don't care about keyword density, search engines do. Users don't really care if your H1 tags reflect the search page results, search engines do. There are over 100 factors that make a search engine friendly website, but the user does not care about these.

This is where our SEO Services with SEO Web Design becomes effective. With our proven results for both search engines and high usability and eye pleasing web design we can help not only the search engines find you, but increase your return on investment.

What if you already have a Web Design company? No problem. We can do SEO Analysis Reports that your Web Design firm can then implement. This has been done for many of our customers.

Feel free to contact us for further details or if you have any questions.

When we talk about the relationship between SEO and web design, it's usually the technical part of the website design art that's relevant, not the visual part (though certain aspects of visual design have their impact on SEO/SEM, as will be shown below).

One of the latest trends in the SEO industry is to put more and more emphasis on quality web design in the overall SEO process. If you aim at a long term success online, you need to know exactly how design and SEO integrate.

Make Your Design Work For You

Good website design is like a foundation for the building of your future SEO success. The more aspects you think about before you start working on your site, the fewer obstacles you will meet later when you start looking into SEO, web promotion, ROI and other important aspects of your web presence.

If You Are Going To Redesign Your Site

If you need to redesign an existing site (as opposed to building a new one from scratch), you will encounter even more problems and you will need to take these into account to ensure success.One of the most important decisions you will have to make is whether to keep the old URLs or to restructure the site and move to new, more SE-friendly, URLs.

Of course, if the URLs in your old site are already SE-friendly, the decision is simple: you need to preserve them. This way, you won't waste the fruits of your previous achievements; indeed, the improvements you make to your site during the redesign will eventually help you to enhance them.

But what do you do if your old URLs are dynamic with a lot of parameters in the query strings and are unreadable and confusing from a usability point of view, adding nothing to your SEO? Your pages may still have rankings in the SEs, which you would certainly like to preserve. If you reproduce the same ugly URLs in the new version of the site, you'll achieve this, but make further progress impossible. If you move to better URLs (and then 301-redirect old pages to new ones on a per-page basis), you will probably lose your rankings for a short period of time, but benefit in the long run.

The answer, in this case, is no longer so obvious. It will require a lot of statistical analysis, followed by brainstorming sessions involving your company and, if relevant, your client. All interested parties should be well informed of the existing options, as well as the benefits and the complications (risks) each of those options involves.

Accelerate Your Site Performance!

Notice though that if most of your search engine traffic is directed to your home page, then you have nothing to lose and should stick to the second option.Another question that arises when a website is about to be redesigned is the choice of a content management system (CMS).

Of course, if the site is relatively small (with less than, say, 1,000 pages), and you are ready to support it using manual coding and an FTP client, you won't need a CMS at all. The only automation necessary in this case is either PHP (ASP, JSP) includes or SSI (if supported). They will save you a lot of time when you need to edit a repeated block of code (like a navigation menu bar). A change made once will be reflected on all pages automatically.

But if the site is large and requires complicated dynamic functionality (like newsletters, an automatically updated RSS feed, a shopping cart or customised data tracking), or if your client doesn't have any HTML knowledge but needs to update the content regularly, then a CMS is the only way to go.

What is a SE-friendly CMS?

In order to be SE-friendly, a CMS should at the very least comply with the following criteria.

• URL-generation flexibility. You need to be able to choose how your URLs will look, including file and folder names, file name extensions and conventions. A CMS that forces you to use dynamic URLs is definitely a bad one. Also, a good CMS won't generate session IDs for guest users and search engine spiders.
• Title and meta information management. You should be able to assign a unique title tag and unique description and keyword meta tags to every single page, or set up a pattern that will generate this information dynamically.
• HTML management. The code generated by the CMS should be valid, or the software should at least provide opportunities to make it valid, if you have the necessary knowledge. For example, if the HTML editor used in the CMS converts all HTML tags into capital letters or removes quotation marks in attributes, you will never be able to validate your code for XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1, which are now preferred coding standards.

Feel free to contact us for further details or if you have any questions.