Web site search engine positioning/site design

Several keys to search engine positioning and site design are violated constantly.

Don't make these mistakes:

A flashy but inappropriate home page: Graphics are great but search engine robots do not account for them when they classify sites in their automated way. The content of your home page, especially the title of of your home page, is key for your target audiences to find you.

Poor Meta Tag descriptors: If you want people to find you by descriptors other than your organization name, then what you place in your Meta Tag helps them do that. A poor descriptor and site description means you will be lost or dumped far down in results listings where, chances are, few will find you.

Broken or inappropriate hyperlinks: Links are at the core of information presentation in a Web site. They should take readers naturally from one chunk of information to another. When links are broken or poorly planned, they frustrate readers.

Dated materials: A Web site with dated materials is a contradiction. The Web is about the immediacy with which you can communicate to target audiences. Yet, tens of thousands of Web sites are out of date and abandoned on the World Wide Web.

An unreadable site: Busy backgrounds, dark type on dark backgrounds, clashing colors that cause type to vibrate conspire against the first rule of message-sending -- clarity.

When do I use it?

Search Engine Positioning and Site Design services are best used BEFORE you launch a Web site. Then, you have time to craft solutions that fit well with search engine robots and communications objectives.

If you have a Web site and you know that you need better positioning and design, the challenge is more difficult. You have two choices: A site redesign or a splash page linked to your site. Site redesign is expensive, but makes sense in some cases. A splash page carrying appropriate content and Meta Tag descriptors substitutes for your home page and can work well. Both solutions call for careful search engine design and site positioning with testing. To get started on Web site/search engine positioning, see Web references on-line.