Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

The Secret to SEO

Bill Van Patten Fabulous Finch

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Design could sound like two entirely separate activities, but in fact they are very closely related, if not one and the same. Great websites should be designed for two distinct types of visitors, human customers and Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Great website design from a customer perspective involves the ability to convey your unique brand identity through your company logo and associated website design. Some design firms have the combined talent to do both through creative logo and website design that will allow you to bring the vision of your business to life.

But you also need to think about the other website visitors you will have, and that is the Internet search engines. They serve as the eyes of potential new customers, leading them to your website based on keywords used during searches for the products and services you offer. In designing your website, whatever designer you choose should help you develop a website that is search engine friendly as well as customer friendly.

Search engines typically like a rich content of original words, as they use these words to develop indexes of websites that most closely match the search criteria of a user. But customers shopping for products and services don’t necessarily want to visit a website that looks like an encyclopedia. Potential customers want to be entertained and informed with a mix of both written content describing your products and services, as well as product images, art, and graphics that define you as a cut above your competition and ultimately the website they will want to do business with. So you’ve got to strike a balance and satisfy both your human visitors as well as the search engines which seemingly have no interest in art, graphics and the aesthetics that appeal to people.

But search engines actually can like art and graphics, if you know how to talk to them. When I approached my web designer, I wanted eye candy. I asked for “drop dead gorgeous” graphics and they delivered beyond my wildest expectations. The original artwork created for my website has become famous among bird enthusiasts and attracts thousands of visitors each month representing almost every country in the world. But how are these visitors finding me? Primarily through search engines, where I have placed my website on Page 1 for a number of competitive keywords on the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

When your designer builds your website, they will ask you for the keywords and phrases that define each page of your website and include them in the website address (URL) for each page. This simple but very important technique is the foundation for making your website search engine friendly, as a URL carries very heavy weight in how a search engine decides if your webpage is relevant to a search. The Page Title is the next piece of information a search engine looks at and your designer should create a custom Page Title for each page of your website. Make sure your Page Title is relevant to, but different from the actual URL.

The next step is to give your designer a unique word or phrase to tie to your logo image, as well as every unique image on each page of your website. They will tie these words and phrases to the images using what are called Alt Tags, which is simply a way of giving a search engine meaningful words to associate with an image.

They do all this by using some kind of Content Management System (CMS) that you can continue to use long after your website has been built. I would highly recommend using this service, as every time you upload a new image to your website, the CMS will allow you to create an Alt Tag. And it doesn’t stop there. The CMS will also allow you to create a Page Description, META Description, and META Keywords for each page of your website, and update them at will as your website evolves over time. If you are unfamiliar with this lingo, don’t let it scare you off. They are all just different descriptions for groups of words used to describe your website to search engines. Your designer will show you how to update this information in the CMS. Just get in there and type words, phrases, and sentences that make sense to you, and they will also make sense to the search engines. The CMS actually gives you complete control over all aspects of your website. It is very user friendly, using a “What You See, Is What You Get” system that allows you to manage your entire website, touching as much, or as little as you are comfortable with.

When all this is combined, you will end up with a beautiful website design that is both appealing to your real customers, as well as the search engines, as there will be written content underlying every important element of your website. To the human eye, your website will be a fantastic mix of written and visual content. To a search engine’s eye, your website will be a rich body of written information that it can digest and index into meaningful search results just as if it were visiting an encyclopedia.

Bill holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Accounting from California State University, and has held positions as a Management Analysis and Planning Systems Analyst, Human Resource Information System Supervisor, and Financial Systems Integration Manager at Ford Motor Credit Company prior to founding Fabulous Finch.

Posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Computers, Design, Graphic Design, Internet, Marketing, Small Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.