Things to Look for in a Web Designer for SEO

A great web designer can make your site look and feel great. It is very important to consider whether the design of your website is going to affect the ranking you achieve in the search engines because at times it has a detrimental effect.

If you are looking for a web designer that may help you achieve high ranking in an SEO, you need to choose carefully. There are a lot of firms out there, and some will provide a lot more value than others. First of all make sure that the web designer is creating your site in house or else outsourcing the project may not meet your requirements.

Here are a few things to consider – and to test your web designer:

Emphasize on content – make sure that the designer you are looking for does not hate text because some really do. They think that adding a lot of text will spoil the structure of their design. But it is important to understand that people may get attracted to the design itself but won’t buy because of this. It is the words that will persuade them.

It’s also the words that influence the search engines. If you don’t have enough content on your web page then you may be ranked lower by the SEO engines. Adding content doesn’t add cost to it but gives relevant results. Therefore it is also considered to be the cheapest way to get a high ranking with SEO’s. A web designer is considered efficient if he gives importance to this aspect.

Emphasize on images names and alt tags – some people tend to spend more money on their website designs and are keen to add lots of relevant pictures and selective photos as well but do not consider the importance of giving those pictures a relevant name or tags.

It’s good form to have alt tags on pictures because it enhances usability. It will also enhance the ranking at the SEO engines such as Google, for example. This search engine reads the names of images and the alt tags and the results will influence the page ranking. The names and alt tags need to be relevant to the field and should contain keywords. A good web designer should consider this point as very important.

Following the right track – it is very important to queue the designing work in order and keeping the most important content at the highest priority. This way there will be less chance for important work to be left out.  If your designer manages this, he surely is an efficient designer.

No flash, No splash – the web designer should not consider designing splash pages. They damage search engine rankings because there is no relevant content on them. They annoy many visitors too, as they have to click through them. Flash content is all well and good, but Google won’t give you a better ranking for it. So if the most important marketing message is in flash, it won’t be seen by the search engines.

Required marketing strategies – If the designer does not know how to market your website or build it properly, then you should not choose him. Instead, go to a firm that does. After all, without SEO, no one will ever see your site.

If you look into all these things, you will have a very pleasant experience with the firm you go to, and you’ll be satisfied with the site you get. The site will also be a lot more effective and actually bring in new business and give you the online presence that you are after.