Beautiful or Findable? The Art of Choosing a Great Website Designer

The internet is constantly evolving. If you were to compare websites of ten years ago against those of today, you would notice great improvements in usability and professionalism. As the number of blogs and websites continue to go up, in almost an exponential rate, being able to stand apart from the crowd in order to be found is becoming alarmingly more difficult. Sites that are successful at attracting web visitors need to find the correct balance of beauty and being able to rank high in the search engine results. A great website designer is an expert of knowing just how to mix these factors.

A site that is beautiful but fails to make it to the top of the search engine rankings will fail. Although it might be aesthetically appealing to website visitors and is able to have stellar conversion rates, the minimal amount of traffic will not be satisfactory. Likewise, one that is "ugly" but is optimized well enough to attract a ton of traffic, will have extremely poor conversion rates and also fail to live up to the expectations of the site owner. Balance between looks and effectiveness are key. Great website designers not only understand this, but have the skill and experience to accomplish both goals.

The Importance of Having a Beautiful Website

First impressions are incredibly important when it comes to the internet. The majority of website visitors will normally come to a judgment about a site within moments of landing it. It many cases, visitors will only stay a few seconds before clicking off the page to find a more suitable site among the countless to choose from. A professional-looking site conveys a higher sense of confidence and reliability. The more trust that visitors have with a website, the more likely they are to take the call to action that is being presented. Whether it is to make sale or to sign up for a newsletter, conversion rates will go up the better the site looks. Good designers will know how to create a pleasant viewing experience for the visitor in order to maximize conversion rates.

The Importance of Being Able to Be Found

There are billions of sites to select from online. The holy grail of online marketing efforts is something called "organic traffic." This is the traffic generated from people finding a site through search engines like Google. Organic traffic is so valuable and sought after because it is free, and provides very targeted individuals that are actively looking for the information on your websites. The challenge then is to rank as close to position number one in the search engines results for the search terms that your ideal prospects are looking for. Website designers are masters of accomplishing this by a variety of onsite search engine optimization techniques.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, also commonly known as "SEO" for short, is the practice of designing a website in a way that in reaches the top of the search engine rankings, and stays there. Without proper SEO, your site will never show up anywhere near the top of the rankings, thereby getting very little, if any, organic traffic. The reality is that very few people look past the first page of the search engine results. So if your site is ranking on page two and beyond, the chances of getting any decent traffic is minimal.

Common SEO Techniques Practiced By Great Web Designers

Web designers have a number of different methods of improving a site's on-page search engine optimization. The key to effective SEO is knowing where to include targeted keywords and keyword phrases within a website's design. Including the keyword phrases within the site's content is one way of strengthening the SEO. One caution is adding the keywords too often in the content. The major search engines will see this as spammy and this can actually hurt rankings.

Talented website designers also make sure to include the keywords being targeted within a site's title and description. Including keywords in the tags of a site is also a way of raising the search engine optimization and subsequent rankings. Another technique is bolding the font of specific keywords. Also, including video and images with the targeted keywords as file names and captions has been shown to provide additional improvements in search engine optimization levels.

There is a wealth of opportunity to find new business, and develop relationships of current clients, through the use of a properly designed website. The challenge is in designing that site in a way that both delivers a growing and consistent amount of organic traffic from the search engines, and also converts the maximum of those visitors as possible. Choosing a website designer that can build a site that is both beautiful and contains sufficient search engine optimization is critical to success.