Web design and SEO should be like peas and carrots. Any website that is created by a web design bureau that does not have knowledge of SEO is unlikely to rank well in the Search Engines. So why is this an issue?

Not having a Search Engine Friendly website means Google may not be able to find or index your website

This means that you may lose customers or clients who could potentially be looking for your services because your website cannot be found

These customers usually end up doing business with your competitors, leaving them stronger and you weaker

Most companies and even many web design bureaus are not aware of this

These are landing pages that just have a large graphic or image saying click me to enter or something similar. A great way to look at the home page is as a table of contents. It should list all the interesting and relevant categories within the website that a user might be interested in seeing. These splash pages can cause problems with the search engines because:

They are bad at sharing link strength throughout the site because they are rarely cross linked between other pages. This makes it more difficult for your internal pages to rank well

They usually lack quality content, thus reduce your ability to score for long tail key phrases that make up a large percentage of your traffic.

They often include the use of redirects. This may make it difficult for the search engines to index your pages or even worse could be the sign of something more sinister.

Some businesses have very good reasons for using this type of page. Even in these cases (and they are fairly rare) it makes sense to have a SEO expert work with the page to ensure its searchability is maximised.

Often a website is created without a clear site structure. This can cause problems because the search engines cannot clearly index the pages it needs to and the pages that need to be the strongest within the search engines may not be given the required prominence to rank. Creating a site structure to rank a range of keywords in competitive areas is an art form in itself and can be very challenging for a SEO novice.

Text is the lifeblood of search engines. Spiders and bots can read text. They struggle with images. Unfortunately users like images, so we end up with a disconnect. Do we target our web pages for the search engines or for users?

Fortunately, a good SEO can do both. With inventive use of the space on a webpage graphics for users and text for both users and the search engines can be included. It is even possible to optimize images to an extent too, and this can be a highly effective strategy when interlinking a website.

Web design and SEO are specialist niches. A good SEO may be a bad designer and vice versa. We recommend ensuring someone with good SEO knowledge looks over the design process of your website.