If I were to ask you right now if your website is optimized for high visibility in search engines, what would you say? What if I were to ask what position your site appears in for your target search terms in the major search engines? Or how about if each page of your site has tailored Title and META Tags? Read more below.
If you answer “No” or “I don’t know” to any of these questions, your website is missing out on traffic because it’s not designed for search engine compatibility. Ask your web designer today if they’ve optimized your site for your target keywords and made sure it’s visible in Google and other major search engines.
Search engine optimization is the process of making a website more compatible with search engines in order to achieve a higher ranking. This can be done by making changes to the website’s code or by providing more relevant content. In my experience, web designers often keep secrets from their clients. One of the biggest secrets is that they may not know what makes a website compatible with search engines. Another is that they may prefer to build expensive, flashy sites that don’t use a lot of text.
So your web designer may have included target keywords and phrases in your Title tag and META tags, but this is only a tiny fraction of what’s needed to optimize your site. Search engines actually need to find target keywords within the visible body text on your site pages, as well as within the text links that help people navigate your pages.
If you want your site to rank highly for particular words or phrases, each page of your site MUST be built with those words and phrases in mind. This means that your title and meta tags, as well as the visible text on your site, should all include these search terms. It’s also a good idea to build and optimize a page for each product or service that you offer. This way, if anyone types in those phrases in a search engine, your site is more likely to appear higher in the search results.
So why wasn’t your site optimized for search engines when it was built? Depending on who developed your site and how it was built, you’ll find a million different reasons for this. Many web developers believe it is the site marketer’s job to ensure the site is found in search engines and vice versa. Most don’t bother checking that your site is found in the important search engines, assuming you or your marketing department will do it. Or perhaps it wasn’t discussed in your original development budget.
Not many web design firms know how or have time to optimize a site successfully, no matter what they tell you. They might feel it is outside their core business, or they might believe it is not part of the “design process”. Consequently, your site can be launched for many months without the search engines having any idea it exists.
Some web development firms don’t include even the most basic META tags in your site code when building it. Or those that do include META tags without close consultation with you, resulting in the wrong search terms used and poor performance.
This is quite typical! Remember that search engine optimization requires both client interaction and constant monitoring to be successful.
The bottom line is that if your designer can’t show you substantial search engine traffic they’ve achieved for other clients, chances are they won’t be able to optimize your site properly. Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists have sprung up to fill the need for these services.
Many SEO’s will work either directly with you or with your web site designer to ensure your site gets the exposure it deserves in the most popular search engines and directories.
My suggestion is to pay a little more for a specialist with a good track record and reap the rewards. Remember, search engine users generally only explore the first 10 or 20 search results. If you site isn’t in the top 20, you won’t be found.
Always include search engine optimization into your marketing budget or your site could be as effective as a billboard at the end of a dead end street.
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