Search engine optimization offers businesses, both large and small, a wide range of techniques and strategies that can be used to boost their online visibility and increase customer awareness of their brands. Unfortunately, many business owners fail to consider their SEO needs when they begin to design the company website. All too often, business owners end up with a site that is pretty to look at, but that is doing nothing to attract customers or improve their company’s online performance. Before long, it becomes clear that the website is not performing as hoped, and a new set of web designers and SEO specialists need to be brought in to totally revamp the website, often at Cube we find it is cheaper for clients to consider optimization at the start. But by incorporating basic SEO principles into the initial design, business owners can position their websites for better online visibility and performance, and can ensure that their websites provide a positive online experience for their customers.
Content Management Systems
The first step to building a quality website that can be easily optimized is to choose a content management system, or CMS. There are many popular CMSs to choose from, including WordPress, Joomla and Durpal. All of these are designed to be user friendly, and make it easy for people to design their own websites without the need to hire profession web designing firms. By far, the most popular of these is WordPress, which offers an intuitive user interface, and makes it easy for inexperienced website owners to design and publish web pages, and to modify existing content and code. Once you have chosen a CMS that you are comfortable with, it’s time to start designing an SEO friendly website.
SEO Plug-Ins
Most of the popular content management systems offer all-in-one SEO plug-in packs for their clients. These packages make it easy for inexperienced webmasters to create navigational links and SEO specific URLs. These all-in-one SEO packs also help webmasters to write effective meta-descriptions and to optimize content titles so that they can be easily found and indexed by Google and other search engines. These SEO principles are essential to a website’s success, and it is important to choose a content management system that offers plug-ins that you find are easy to understand and implement.
The Body of Your Website
Once you have chosen a CMS that you are comfortable with, and you have familiarized yourself with its SEO plug-in packs, it will be time to start thinking about the actual structure of your website. There are few basic aspects to a successful website that every business owner should consider.
- The Blog – Content is one of the cornerstones of search engine optimization, and every successful website needs a dedicated blog section where new and interesting content can be published. New content drives SEO, and SEO drives traffic. If you hadn’t considered a blog necessary for your website, now is the time to rethink that position.
- Terms of Service Pages – There are two pages that should be included in any website, the ‘terms of service page’ and the ‘privacy policy page’. These pages should be published separately, and should be linked via the footer of every internal page on your website. The purpose of these pages is to provide valuable information to your website’s visitors about the way your company does business. More importantly though, these two pages indicate to Google and other search engines that your website is offering quality content and services for online users.
Designing a successful website is an ongoing process, but these few tips will get you started on the road to creating a website that is SEO friendly and that will perform well with customers and search engines alike. After your website has gone love, you will want to continue to monitor it using Google Webmaster Tools, so that you can see how it is performing and make any adjustments that are necessary to improve the site. By incorporating basic SEO principles into the initial design of your website, you can be sure that it is poised to perform well for customers and for search engines, and that it is primed to receive any necessary SEO updates that will improve its performance in the future.
