Read these tips if you want to make your web design work for you.
Offer What People Are Interested In – Not What You Want To Push
Good websites will be found by most search engines – don’t pay for regular submissions services unless you have a very complicated and extensive internet and website strategy.
Stay Current
Keep information up-to-date – many search engines take account of update frequency, so update your website frequently (i.e., weekly at least) even if it’s just small changes. Be creative when choosing topics but ensure they are relevant, intelligent and interesting. Keep up with the news, the times and the ever expanding World Wide Web.
Search Result Ranking
The big three search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google remains by some considerable margin the most popular search engine, accounting for a sizeable majority of all searches. Google’s listings are based on Google’s very clever ranking algorithms, basic details of which freely available at Google’s own website. If you only focus on one, under all normal circumstances this should be Google.
Other sites linking to yours will certainly improve your search engine rankings, so reciprocal links are okay, but building a site those other sites will want to link to be far more beneficial than directing all that effort instead into a reciprocal ink campaign. Reciprocal linking is much over-rated as a website optimisation tactic. Relevant high quality links matter. Having hundreds of irrelevant links on tiny unpopular websites counts for very little.
Search engines downgrade or de-list sites that cheat, so don’t cheat. If you want to know what constitutes cheating look on the web for the very many highly complicated website marketing and promotion websites. www.deadlock.com is a good one, and they also have lots of really detailed advice far beyond these basic principles when and if you’re ready for it.
Measure Your Traffic
There are lots of trackers and systems to use – www.extreme-dm.com is a good example of a system that is either free (their ‘public’ version) or paid-for (multiple pages ‘private’ version). Aside from these separate trackers most website hosting solutions and providers now include traffic statistics packages. Google Analytics now offers an extremely sophisticated free website tracking and analysis tool.
Read website optimisation blogs and newsletters, and learn about the tools you can use to design and measure your website’s performance in relation to the web as a whole – especially what people are searching for, how they find websites, and what you can do to optimise your own website. For example, Google Trends is very useful tool for assessing the relative popularity of website search terms. Overture’s keyword search inventory tool is also very useful, when you can actually get on the site – it is inconsistently available, perhaps due to high demand.
If you engage a website designer or agency follow the principles for engaging with any creative agency – develop your specification first (i.e., especially all text, spelling and grammar checked, structure and process implications) and then let them get on with it – don’t waste a designer’s time finalising and correcting these fundamental content and material issues once they’ve begun the design stage.