Horizon Web Development

It seems that web design companies are almost ubiquitous at the moment, with new ones popping up all the time and with most being set up by amateurs, hobbyists and those having recently finished a college course in web design, it can be difficult to be sure that you’re getting a quality service from an expert.

One aspect of web site design that separates the amateur from the professional is Search Engine Optimisation (seo), how can you ensure that your website is ranked as highly as possible in the major search engines?

Firstly you need to remember that while a flashy site with fancy graphics and so forth make look good both to you and your customers, the search engine spiders (so called because they crawl your site and gather information on it) won’t be impressed at all. To more clearly see what I mean take a look at what Google sees of the Horizon Web Development homepage here.

As you can see all the nice pictures are discarded, Google is only really interested in the text. With this in mind it is important that your site is designed to pamper to both the potential viewers, customers and the search engines.

Bright colours and animations should be kept to a minimum on most sites, text should be clearly laid out and the keywords spread evenly throughout the page. The days where you could saturate your page with certain keywords to get higher page ranking are long gone, now it is better to scatter your keywords into proper sentences and paragraphs.

Typically search engines don’t read JavaScript or Flash, so be careful how these are used (splash screens for instance are a definite no-no), you should also make sure that your pages are filled with interesting content that people want to read and that is updated regularly.

Posted by Horizon Web Development on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 at 7:53 PM | Permalink