Why Web Design and SEO Are So Important

Face it: We’re in the 21st Century and the Internet is used by just about everyone to find just about everything.

A company’s website is either the first or second impression a customer has about the business. I’ve had many customers look up my company’s website while I was on the phone with them. The website will often influence a customer’s perception of the quality of the products and services being offered. If the site is plain-looking, boring, short on content, poorly designed, hard to navigate, or hard to find in search engines, you’d be better off not having a website at all!

I’ve lost count of how many business clients I’ve encountered who give their web presence last priority. The same clients wouldn’t dream of allowing their field sales reps to show up at customers’ offices wearing jeans and T-shirts, but many websites give the impression that their owners just don’t care about quality.

A successful business, whether or not it processes online transactions, whether it’s global, national or local, needs to regard its website as a “first contact sales rep” for marketing purposes.

And I’m not just talking about the appearance of the site, but its search engine ranking. Without the proper structure, tagging, keyword selection and content management, the site will be virtually invisible to potential customers.

Web developers and designers are plentiful; true Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts are not. The SEO goal of every website project should be: to make the site easier to find than the competition. This means raising the Google “Page Rank” of a site’s landing pages, and ensuring that these pages have been optimized to the most important keywords/phrases the business is targeting.

There are dozens of ways to build the SEO profile of a website, and despite rumors to the contrary, not all of Google’s ranking algorithms are secret. Reaching Page-One of Google is a science – it just looks like magic! One of the most efficient ways to rank-up a web page is to have other highly-ranked pages link to it. Without quality “backlinks,” you could have a gorgeous and perfectly-structured website on the Internet and still end up on page-100.

There are many SEO tools available that help reduce the time and cost of optimizing a website, including Market Samurai, Commission Blueprint, and Google’s own Keyword Analyzer. But having great wiz-bang tools isn’t enough. You must fully understand how SEO and social media influence rankings on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

If you haven’t been giving your website the priority and attention it deserves, whether it’s just a WordPress blog or a full-blown commercial site, then you’re leaving money on the table. If your customers can’t find you in the search engines, then you don’t exist!

For more information about SEO and how web pages can quickly appear on page-one of Google, please visit LarkinSoft.