The Last Step Of The Web Design Process: SEO
Most people, to say nothing of businesses, put a lot of thought and a lot of work into their web design, at least if they have any ambitions of reaching a large audience or customer base. An enormous amount of time and money is spent on building websites every year, including writing, editing and fine tuning HTML and CSS code, development or customization of interactive site elements using PHP, Perl, Python and other scripting languages, on graphic design, the list goes on and on.
However, you could spend a fortune on web design and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the effort and still find that the response to your site is a little less than you would have liked. In fact, you could have the best looking website in the world, complete with user friendly features, custom designed server side applications and every bell and whistle you care to name and still have it fall flat in terms of attracting readers and/or customers. No matter how wonderful your site may be, it really doesn't matter if no one actually knows it's there chicago web design.
This brings us to the point: how to get visitors to your site and build or expand your audience or if your website is for your business, to drive sales and build brand awareness among consumers. While every element of web design is important, there is one thing which many newly minted website owners, including businesses and online entrepreneurs fail to take into account when designing and building their website: SEO.
In case you're not familiar with the term, SEO is an acronym which stands for search engine optimization, which is a term which covers a wide variety of different practices aimed at driving traffic to websites by making them easier to find via search engines. There are a lot of different things you can do to optimize your site and make it more attractive to Google and other major search engines and if possible, the best time to start implementing SEO techniques is as early as possible. If you already have a website, don't panic; you can still optimize your site. However, if you're building a new site, it's a good idea to include search engine optimization in your web design game plan. Think of it as the last, but by no means least, step in the process of building a website. Read on for a few things you can do to help your site raise its profile and start bringing in more visitors:
Create a Sitemap:
A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like: a sort of map of the pages on your website, including internal and external links. A sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site as well as helping the search engine robots to determine you're your site is about. Submitting your sitemap to the major search engines (and minor ones too, if you have the time to do so) will help your site to be indexed more quickly so it can be found by your potential readers or customers. Most web hosting companies offer tools which can automatically generate a sitemap in the XML format used by Google and other search engines.
Robots.txt:
Another element your site needs in order to be properly optimized for the search engines is a robots.txt file. This is a small text file in the root directory of your website which does something very important: it tells the search engines where to look and where not to look when indexing your content. For instance, you don't really need (and usually don't want) the search engines indexing folders of images, JavaScript files or other content which isn't relevant to people searching for your site.
You can also use this file to deter certain search engines from indexing your site - and yes, there are reasons why you might want to do this, though that's a topic for another day. The instructions in your robots.txt file are sometimes ignored by search engine robots, but you'll definitely do better in the search engines if you take the time to create this important file.
Meta tags:
The header section of the HTML code for every page of your website should contain the appropriate meta tags; these are invisible to people visiting your site, but not to search engines. Your meta tags tell search engines what the topic of each page is, so the content of your tags needs to be relevant to the content on the page. These tags include the title tag, which is the most important; if at all possible, the most important search term you want people to find your site with should be included in this tag. The other tag to pay close attention to is the meta description tag, which should be a brief summary of the page.
This discussion barely scratches the surface of all there is to know about optimizing your site for the search engines, but these are good areas to begin delving deeper. No web design is complete without taking care of your site's SEO - more so than almost anything else, good search engine optimization techniques will help your site to become a success.