If you build it,
people won't necessarily come. The most beautiful and
easiest to use site in the world will be worth little
if you have no visitors. The vast majority of traffic
to most web sites comes through the three major search
engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live.
Since the foundation of most organizations' Internet
marketing efforts starts with their Web site, we place
enormous importance on search engine friendly Web development.
A surprising number of Web sites inadvertently contain
technological obstacles that prevent search engines from
reading and therefore, including them in their search
results.
Because we understand how search engines work, we can
create web sites that are easy for search engines to read,
understand, and list. Not only do we know what to avoid,
we know how to design web sites that search engines like.
Web Site First Impressions
First impressions are even more important online than
they are offline because you will probably never get a
chance for a second impression with visitors to your web
site.
Poor web design can leave visitors and your potential
customers with a negative impression of your organization.
A Consumer Web Watch survey found that nearly half of
the consumers in their study based the credibility of
the Web sites they visited in part on such superficial
aspects such as overall web design. The study surmises
that "the visual design may be the first test of
a site’s credibility. If it fails on
this criterion, Web users are likely to abandon the site
and seek other sources of information and services."
We get the importance of first impressions throughout
our web design process by considering the layout, typography,
font size, and even the psychological import of the color
scheme for our web site development projects.
Web Site Usability
The lightning quick speed of the Internet has made us
impatient and with ubiquitous broadband adoption, we're
only going to get more impatient. If a visitor to your
web site can't find the information they're looking for,
they'll quickly surf on. And they probably won't come
back.
That same Consumer Web Watch survey found that more than
a quarter of all their participant's mentioned a site's
overall organization when considering the credibility
of a web site. They commented on how well the information
on a site fit together and how easy it was to navigate.
Web sites that were easy to navigate were considered more
credible.
Our web design process places special emphasis on such
usability factors. A well-structured site is not only
easy for visitors to use, it will help in your search
engine marketing efforts.
Web Site Copywriting
While visual web design and usability are important factors
in a successful web site, the words are your site are
just as important. Your copy should be clear, easy to
read, and presented in the way that people read online,
which is markedly different to how people read print.
People scan online much more than they do offline, so
headlines and small blocks of text are essential to getting
your message across. It is also important to weave keyword
seach terms into your copy to help in your search engine
positioning.
Search Engine Optimization
In order to high visibilty in the search engines, your
web design must incorporate keywords that people are using
in their searches. The trick is knowing where on your
web site to put the keywords and at the proper frequency
so that you get prominent search engine placement. There
is a delicate balance between an appropriate keyword frequency
and what the search engines consider spam. If the search
engines think your web site is "spamming" them
with too many keywords, they may ban you from their listings.