Good web design is important to create a site that is attractive to visitors yet still works properly.
Whilst designers are good at looking at the navigation and aesthetics of a site, not every web designer will know about SEO or how to apply it to their design.
It is important for every website to be ranked well in the search engines because it is the search engines that send the largest percentage of visitors to most sites. Also, when most people are looking for products or services online they turn to a search engine to find them the sites that best match their query.
To do well in a search engine your site needs to be optimised. This is what you will be paying for if you hire a company to do search engine optimisation (SEO). Whilst you can do SEO on a site that has already been built, it helps if the SEO considerations are taken into account at the design stage.
There are many ways to optimise a site and a few are mentioned below.
It is important to effectively use meta tags for a page. The meta tags are the title tag, description tag and alt tags. The title tag is the one that shows as the tab name at the top of the web page. It should be succinct, unique and describe the page - not the entire website. The description tag is important for the click through rate. Again it needs to be succinct, unique and descriptive of the page. The alt tag is the alternative words for an image. They should describe the image e.g. ‘solid oak wardrobe’ rather than leaving the name the camera gave it e.g. IMG001.
Designers also sometimes overlook content in the form of text. The text informs the search engines what the page is about and gives it some substance. Content must be unique and ideally a few hundred words long.
Search engines look for an XML sitemap to tell them what URLs belong to the site. It is like the sitemap for humans except it is in web code. Usually they can be found if you type in /sitemap.xml at the end of the domain name.
Often, designers will simply put your site live and hand it over to you. However, once the site goes live, you will need all other versions of your site pointing to the one you want as your main one. This means that if you have a .com and .co.uk version of your site, you should choose the best one and use a 301 redirect from the other one. A 301 redirect will tell a search engine that the page it was looking for has permanently moved to a new location and any humans that land on the page will be redirected to the new page. Any links that were pointing to the old page will pass on their value to the new page.
If you are using a web designer, make sure that they have a basic understanding of SEO and make sure you know who is going to be responsible for filling in meta tags etc and who will perform the required redirects.
The sooner you get your site optimised the quicker it can start to work for you in the search engines.
