Web Design and SEO

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

Ok, so if you’ve followed my guide from the start, by now you’ve: organised your hosting, chosen your domain and thought about your SEO plan. So the next step is to think about the actual design of your website. Good web design is a crucial element to success with your users and customers and as a result with the search engines too so, in this stage of my guide, I will be covering some of the important considerations that need to be taken before a web designer or development team is briefed. Web design and SEO need to be considered as a dual process and I will explain why below. This article follows on from Part Four: SEO Planning. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Getting your site design right for both users and search engines is a crucial planning stage for internet start-up businesses. Getting this wrong can be a very costly mistake. In addition, some small business start-ups also make the mistake of viewing SEO as a process which occurs after their website has been designed and launched. This is probably the biggest mistake of all. If you’re planning on launching a new website with natural search as one of your marketing objectives, it is absolutely crucial that your web development team are both aware of this and clued up on SEO design best practice. In addition, unless you are an expert on site architecture, it’s highly advisable to bring in an SEO consultant to work with your web development team on areas such as key phrase integration.

Key Phrase Integration

Conducting thorough key phrase research is another crucial SEO planning stage that must be carried out before you even speak to a web designer or development team. I will cover some tips and tools for conducting key phrase research at a later stage in this guide (Part Nine: Key-phrase Research and Part Eleven: Competitor Benchmarking), however, the important point to note here is that your key phrase strategy must be built into the brief for your new website. If you are uncertain how to go about briefing your web developers on key phrase integration, it would be advisable to employ an experienced SEO consultant to assist you with this important phase of the process. A good SEO consultant will be able to advise you on realistic key phrase objectives and strategies.

Remember, small business SEO strategies must differ to those devised for bigger companies due to issues such as budget disparity and market competition.

A good consultant will also be able advise you on the key-phrases you stand a chance to compete for and the likely cost for doing so. They will also be able to work with your web development team to ensure that your key phrases are integrated efficiently into your site architecture. However, if you choose to brief your designers yourself, you need to ensure that your target keywords and phrases are integrated across your navigation scheme, categories, headings, page titles and cross-links.

Good Design

Good website design is crucial to the success of your SEO campaigns. Poor quality sites will drive visitors away and the resulting high bounce rate (“bounce” meaning visitors who came to a site but left without visiting any other page) will, over time, result in lower rankings. Internet start-ups need to put their users and customers first when planning their SEO objectives for new websites. Websites that are engineered well for the search engines but not for users will not ultimately succeed online. Important elements to consider in the web design and SEO process include:

Navigation – Do your site visitors know where they are or where they should go regardless of the landing page they arrive at? All pages on your site must feature a logical navigation scheme to aid visitors with their journey.

Guiding the Eye – Good web design should lead your visitors around your site in a visually engaging manner. Strong logo branding should flow into other elements such as bold images and carefully presented body text. The position, colour schemes, contrast and size of your page elements will help guide the eye of your visitor.

Spacing – Line spacing or “leading” can affect how easy and readable your site text appears. This can be adjusted in your CSS code. You also need to ensure that there is the right amount of padding between your page elements (text and images, for example). Space between elements also helps to make your site more legible. “White space” or “empty space” will give proportion, balance and contrast to your pages.

Typography – Your choice of fonts should reflect your brand identity. Traditional fonts may suit one type of business where a modern, stylish font suits another. Again, spacing, font sizes and colours should be thought about carefully.

Consistency – Are your web pages aligned with each other and consistent in appearance? Are your page elements, including your use of colour and text, the same across your entire site? A lack of consistency between web pages will look unprofessional and cheap. Consistent, quality design will reinforce a vision of credibility and trustworthiness.

Small business start-ups should view branding, web design and SEO as an integrated early planning stage. Thorough key phrase research must be conducted before you brief a web designer and if you have any doubts about keyword integration, it’s advisable to bring in an SEO consultant to work with your chosen design team. In addition, your website branding must be consistent with your activities offline. Posters, flyers and press advertisements that bear little visual consistency with your website will not help you to build your brand. Your brand is about building trust, recognition, credibility and authority with your users and customers and is a crucial element for business start-ups of any size.

Web Design and SEO Checklist

• Make sure SEO is part of your web design brief
• Bring in an SEO consultant if you are unsure about site architecture
• Conduct thorough key-phrase research and include this with your design brief
• Ensure your site design follows web standards

Part Six

In part six I will cover the topic of site architecture and how the construction of a website can dramatically affect search engine indexation and rankings. Click here to go to part six.