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SEO and Your Website Design

There are many elements that go into SEO.  Keyword implementation comes to mind along with quality inbound links.  One of the most essential components of all is your actual website.  When preparing to embark on an SEO mission, the first thing you need to ensure is that your site has a user-friendly feel.  This basically means that your pages are navigable, links visible and set up correctly.  It also helps if your site is built with complete, intriguing, quality content.  If the navigation of your site is sloppy with misspelled words and improper grammar, your SEO efforts will likely be less than effective.

When designing your site with SEO in mind, it is important to provide usability for your visitors and accessibility for the search engines.  A proper design will ensure that visitors can get around with ease and do not run into pages that take too long to load.  You should also know that Flash and errors in HTML code could possibly prevent from search engine robots from properly crawling and indexing your site.  A good site structure is one that caters to both your visitors and the search engines.  As a website owner, achieving a site optimized for the search engines could be a challenge, especially if you lack design skills.  When this is the case, you may need to rely on third-party professionals.

Expertise is Key

Because these elements are so important, several companies have emerged to offer their services.  Some even employ both SEO experts and web designers, allowing you to kill two birds with one stones by having someone make sure your site is optimized, and another to ensure that its easy to navigate and use.  The key is to do your research and take a little time evaluating different firms.   The best company is one that responds to your inquiries in a timely manner with satisfactory answers.  Rather than making claims about how fast or where they can ensure your rankings, they are honest and confident that their expertise will deliver results.  In short, you want a reputable firm that has proven the ability to create designs that meet W3C compliance and posses an understanding of the latest web trends as they relate to SEO.

No Guarantees

Even when turning to a professional web designer, one should never automatically assume that shelling out cash will guarantee you a top spot on Google.  The internet has opened up numerous opportunities and because of this, the web is a very competitive arena. Chances are, there are thousands of entrepreneurs who share your ambition for succeeding online.  They could even be targeting the same market as yourself.  You can spend a pretty penny on web design but without optimized content and a good marketing strategy, your beautiful website will get buried in Cyberspace.

Expectations will constantly be higher as the web continues to evolve.  Your visitors expect more feature-rich content while search engines increasingly prefer fast loading sites.  For this reason, the proper coding and effective optimization of your site are crucial.  If you don’t get it right the first time, you could find yourself paying even more to get the right design.

Should You Outsource SEM?

Search engine marketing and search engine optimization both require a bit of skill and a lot of effort.  Although succeeding at these techniques begins with website design, an experienced developer isn’t always the best person for the job.  With the steep costs charged by SEM firms, several businesses have resorted to outsourcing these efforts to save money and get better results.

Skills Needed

In order to determine if SEM should be cultivated in-house or outsourced, one must first understand the skills required for such as task.  When it comes to effective marketing, these skills are generally divided in the following categories.

Linguistic Aptitude: For the most part, SEM is a linguistic strategy that calls for the matching of the language used by web surfers as well as the language on your website and how it is interpreted by the search engines.  Because some of the most skilled web designers often used highly technical terms, many of them are not able to clearly present content to the visitor.

Research: Accepting the fact that you don’t know something and taking the initiative to learn is a key to effective SEM.  Extensive research will enable you to find out what keywords your niche market is using, how a search engine handles JavaScript, how Flash can be incorporated into an SEO campaign and much more.  When combined with a good knowledge of marketing, sound research can help you find all the answers you need to the burning questions of SEM.

Technical Experience: The more experience one has with web technologies, the better they will be at SEM.  This comes in handy when working with campaigns such as AdWords and Overture as search engines have a different system for the links used in these programs.  Additionally, someone with an understanding of the web should have knowledge on what type of URLs and redirects are SEO-friendly.    

SEM Experience: Although it goes without saying, the more experience SEM expert has, the more qualified they are for the job.  Don’t be fooled by someone that simply has a site or two under their belts.  Get definitive proof on a person’s SEM background before investing into their claim.  This can be done by obtaining WebPosition reports and server stats for the sites they have worked on.

Conclusion

There is so much that needs to be considered in terms of in-house or outsourced SEM activities, especially when the campaign involves more than keywords and link popularity.  You need to think about costs, turn around time, the firm’s experience and much more.  One way to make this determination is to hire an experienced SEM vendor to provide some insight.  A reputable vendor should be able to evaluate your ROI potential in the investment of an SEM venture.  This will give you a few ideas on how to improve the design of your website and optimize search engine traffic conversions.  Because such a move can help you decide on what an SEM investment is worth, it also works wonders on the decision of whether to outsource the operation.