Web Design or SEO - Which is More Important?

It can seem like a lot for a business owner to handle - but fortunately, having an experienced web designer on your side to take care of managing the design and optimization right from the start will make your online sales go much more smoothly.

Here's what you need to know to get started with SEO Web Design the right way. 1. Don't Hire Both a Web Designer and an SEO Expert - You're better off to find a web designer who knows how to do SEO rather than a search engine optimization firm that maybe knows a friend of a friend whose kid does web design after school. All the optimization in the world can't help a site that's poorly designed and difficult to navigate.


2. Make sure it's done right - right from the start. In building an online business, web design and SEO go hand-in-hand in creating your overall "presence" online. Your site should be built to include only the most recommended search engine techniques. Don't walk - run - whenever anyone promises they'll design your site and submit it to 1,000 directories for some outrageous fee.


3. When in doubt - ask! Most web designers will gladly tell you what steps they plan on taking when it comes to promoting your site in the search engines, and how their design will add to - not take away - from that. Ask for specifics or clarification if you don't understand. As designers, we're always interested in making things easier for our clients!


4. Make a plan - Good search engine results won't happen overnight. That's why it's important that you discuss a timetable and create a plan together with your designer that includes such proven SEO techniques as article writing, press release submission, blog participation and getting quality links back to your site. In time, your efforts will be rewarded with more visitors and customers.



Professional web design and a high search engine ranking are like a good soup - they take time to simmer, but the end result is so delicious, you'll have guests coming back for seconds!


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SEO Methods - Get More Traffic

Ever wondered why your website hasn't been getting much traffic to it? If the answer is yes then maybe you need to take a closer look at the SEO methods that you are using to get traffic to your website. SEO or search engine optimisation is the term given for methods of optimising your website in order for it to rank highly on search engine results pages, and without good SEO a website can be poorly ranked and never get any visitors.SEO can make all the difference if you are looking to get your website a first page ranking and increase the amount of traffic that it receives on a daily basis. But what is SEO and is it difficult to achieve? Here are a few things that you should know about good search engine optimising and getting it right for your website.

* Know your keywords and key phrases and make sure that you have a good knowledge of the keywords that relate to your website. You can find these out by using one of the many online tools for this. Some search engines have their own that you can use. Once you have your keywords and phrases you can put them into the text on your website. This is by simply inserting them in a natural way into your content. Be aware however that too many keywords is seen as stuffing and can have a negative affect on your websites ranking.

* Have quality reciprocal links; by using links to and from good websites you will increase your traffic and ensure quality visitors. Do not be tempted to link to and from just any old site however as this will reduce the quality of your site and too many poor quality links can result in your site being suspended or even banned from some search engines.

* Submit your website to search engines and when you do this the search engines spiders will crawl through your website looking at the links and keywords and this will then be indexed. When a person uses the search engine and enters any of these keywords in it sites that contain relevant keywords and links will be returned in the results pages. In order for a site to be ranked highly it must be highly relevant to the search that has been conducted. Some search engines will allow paid inclusion onto their index and this is a perfectly ethical way of getting a high ranking on a results page, however as this ranking is often purely economically based high ranking websites are not always the most relevant to a particular search. Google does not allow paid inclusions.

* Do not use black hat SEO methods - black hat SEO methods are doing things such as keyword stuffing or putting keywords in the background of web pages but in the same colour as the background. These keywords cannot be seen by a visitor but they can be seen by spiders and are frowned upon. Black hat SEO methods more often than not result in a website from being banned from search engines or suspended for a certain period of time.

So if you want to have the best SEO for your website you need to take a look at it and make sure that you are following the guidelines that are set out above. If you can afford it you might want to think about paid inclusion or employing someone to write the content for your website to optimise it effectively. Which ever SEO methods you choose one thing is for sure - you will be getting more traffic.


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