SEO begins with Good Web Site Design

Design the structure of your web site correctly now to save headaches later.

If you are completely new to the Internet and are researching the subject of SEO before launching your web business, we want to start this section of our SEO guide out with an important warning. If you are intending to hire a professional web designer to create your site, it is vital that you choose wisely. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of paid web designers out there are simply 'designers' who know how to make pretty pages - not how to build web sites which are SEO-based. Because of this, your key guide to the quality of their work is going to be how their other clients rank in the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. If their clients are ranking well, chances are, the designer knows what they are doing. If not, move on to someone who does. By reading this guide, you will gain a more detailed understanding of how to view a prospective designer's work, so read on. It's good you're learning these things now before you waste months or years of time and bundles of money on a web site which will never rank well or achieve the profits you want.

Or, perhaps you have come to this article because you've already got a web site, but it is failing to perform well in the search engines. This guide is for you, too. If things are in really bad shape, you may need to start from scratch, or the SEO work ahead of you may involve only a few adjustments. Either way, Solas Web Design is adamant about the fact that SEO begins with the very basics of web site design, and this is something we've seen surprisingly little written about elsewhere, so let's jump right in.

Purchasing a domain name - Step One

Your domain name is your address, your URL, your www. If you are running a business on-line, you should choose a .com or a .net. Organizations traditionally choose .org and .edu is for purely educational web sites. Choosing your domain name well is your first important step. We have noticed, in our SEO work, that companies that specialize in a specific product or service and choose a domain name like modeldinosaurs.com have a bit of an edge over a company, selling the same products, but with a name like bobsfunhouse.com. Those really specific URLs can be hard to outrank. Obviously, many companies sell more than one product or service, so you'll need to choose wisely in selecting a blanket term that accurately describes your inventory. If you are a gourmet foods company, try to have that be in your domain name, if you are an insurance broker, try to have that be in your domain name.

The challenging thing is that many domain names have already been taken and you may have to finesse your domain a little bit to still get the URL you want. For instance, if orangejuice.com is taken, you might choose orangejuice.net, or organicorangejuice.com or freshorangejuice.com. Sometimes companies will use hyphens, as in orange-juice.com. Be sparing in your use of these. You don't want a domain that looks like orange-juice-tomato-sauce-delicious-homemade-candy.com. More than 2 hyphens in a name tends to indicate a poor quality site, and you don't want to look like a spammer (a bad guy).

It doesn't matter much where you purchase your domain name. Don't pay more than about $15 for one, though. There's no need to. To see which domains are available, you can go to a site like this: registeradomainname.org. You can enter any URL you like into their little search box on the home page to see if it's available. *Remember, if you are very keen on getting a certain domain name for your business, and you see that it's available right now, you may want to buy the domain now, even if you aren't ready to start building your site yet. Think about how you will feel if someone else snaps it up before you do!

Choosing wisely in this area is vital - much more important than where you buy your domain name. Your hosting is like the rent you pay each month to park your site on the world wide web. Rates tend to be from about $7 up. We see no reason for a small business to pay for expensive hosting. There are numerous companies out there offering hosting plans to the tune of $20-$100 a month or more, and we feel that this is unwarranted. Again, if you take a look at registeradomainname.org, you'll see they are offering a basic monthly hosting plan for $6.99. You can pay month-by-month, or pay for a year in advance. We aren't affiliated with this company in any way, but we often use their services for ourselves and for our clients and have been happy with them. Godaddy.com is another popular hosting company with many happy customers. Registeradomainname.org's hosting plan offers you 100GB of disk space and 1000GB of bandwidth. Rather than get all technical with you about what this means, let's just say this is WAY enough for pretty much any small business web site.

What you want to avoid are hosting companies offering you a piddling amount of disk space. 10MB would be a piddling amount. Also, avoid companies that tell you how many pages you are allowed to have and then say they will charge you a 'small additional fee' for extra pages. These are the bad guys. They create terrible problems for their unfortunate customers who fill up the allotted space and then are having to pay extra to expand their website. This is a crummy deal for you. Don't take it. A good rule of thumb is not to sign up for any hosting company that is offering less than 5GB of disk space. For the most part, we run into bad hosting deals with companies which are selling build-it-yourself template web sites. Our opinion of these deals is low, low, low. Template web sites, in general, are not SEO-friendly. We'll discuss this in greater detail later. Other things of importance to consider is whether the company offers you free e-mail boxes, and whether they are MySQL and PHP compatible. MySQL and PHP are what is used to build database-driven websites. If you're going to have a database-driven site, your hosting needs to be compatible with this. Any hosting company should make this clear to you, up front.

Designing an SEO-friendly web site - Step Three

This guide is not going to cover how to write HTML code, or the nitty gritty specifics of web site design. Rather, my purpose here is to outline the key components that go into creating a site that is valued by the search engines, and by the Internet public. If you are going to build your own, handcoded website, obviously, you are going to need to develop crackerjack HTML and CSS skills first, at the very least. You shouldn't have to do this, of course - your goal is not to become a web designer, it's to run a business on-line. Your best bet is probably going to be to hire a web designer to get your site built for you, leaving you free to simply run your business, as this is where your special skills lie. Many people first attempt to create a site using a template-based program, thinking that the ability to create the site themselves without programming skills is a good deal. Unfortunately, the hidden factor behind this is that if you can't get into the code of a website, you can't create it to be search engine friendly. Do-it-yourself template sites are designed to let non-technical people create web pages. They are not designed to rank well in the search engines. As we see it, if no one can find your site, it's of no use to you. Additionally, many people end up having to pay the company to help them with the template, or hire outside help because the so-called 'do-it-yourself' template is horribly confusing. Add to this the fact that most of these companies nickle and dime their customers for every bit of space they use, and the deal suddenly looks less appealing than it did at the outset.

Because of this, we steer folks away from these deals whenever we can. Many of our clients started out with a do-it-yourselfer, only to discover that they could not get their site to rank well in Google, Yahoo! or MSN. So, they ended up coming to us to have their website built from scratch, from the ground up, and now they are able to compete in the Internet marketplace because of the way we design SEO-friendly web sites. I want to add that there are some businesses for whom a template site may be the only way to go, due to budgetary and inventory concerns. If you're planning to run a site with more than 3000 products on it, chances are you are going to need to maintain this yourself. It will not be cost-effective to hire a company like ours to build your site, unless your products are extremely high-end and are going to make you a huge profit return. In other cases, a site owner may not care how their site ranks because it is simply a showpiece, and they want to fiddle with making a pretty design themselves. But, if you are trying to compete with a reasonably-sized e-commerce inventory, template-based sites are likely to start you out in the game with considerable handicaps. The choice is yours, of course, but we hope by thinking this over, you will be saved months or years of wasted time and money, trying to get a template site to work for you when the chances are so slim that it ever will.

So, basically, you've got 4 options when it comes to how your site will be designed. These options are:

• You become a programmer and code your own site
• Your purchase a template website package
• You hire a company like ours that will handcode you an HTML/CSS site
• You hire a PHP programmer who will build you a content management system.

This last option needs to be explained. Content management systems are a bit like template-based sites in that the skilled programmer creates you a backend template that you can use to do your own updates and maintenance without needing programming skills. You simply fill in the blanks in the template form they create in order to make a new page or add a new product. The positive side of this is that you will not have to pay to have your site updated or maintained, you can do it yourself, and the template will have been built just for your business, as opposed to the pre-packaged sites that template companies offer. The negative side is that PHP programmers are EXPENSIVE! In addition to this, PHP sites are more difficult for the search engines to index, and again, unless the programmer trains you as to how to create SEO-friendly pages, you may not be doing what you need to do to build good pages.

In conclusion, our years of experience have lead us to believe that becoming your own web designer and SEO expert or hiring a skilled HTML/CSS programmer who is an SEO professional tend to be the best options for the small business budget. A company like ours can build your site correctly from the ground up, and then stick with you for the long haul when it comes to continuing to expand and improve your value to the search engines in order to pursue top rankings. We feel it is really important that a small business develop a long-term, trusting relationship with an honorable web designer/SEO professional who has proven themselves with their past work, and who can be relied upon to respond promptly to the company's needs, as well as advising them what next steps need to be taken to increase the worth of their site. Our clients posses different levels of technical ability. Some know enough HTML to do their own updates. Others use an intermediary software like Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver to do their own updates. Still others are simply too busy making sales to be bothered with doing their own updates, and hire us to do this for them. These three options meet the needs of most small businesses and work well for our clients.

Once you've determined the route you're going to take in terms of designing your company's website, you're ready to turn your attention to the key components that go into building an SEO-friendly site. The first thing we'll be needing to cover here is links.

Next: Why a web site is all about links!

Return to the SEO Guide Outline.