A “search engine friendly” website will rank high in Google search results, increasing your website traffic and sales
ST LOUIS, MO (StLouisWeb.Design) We frequently reference “search engine friendly” web design throughout our websites’ content. But what is it?
A “search engine friendly” website is a website that shows up in a search result. Most businesses want to find their website on the first page of a search result so customers will easily find them and visit their website to increase site and instore traffic and eventually result in more sales.
After all, what good are websites? Websites are created to increase sales. It is that simple.
Now that might sound easy, but it is apparently not as easy as a person might think. Working in this market for 9 years, we have witnessed many local businesses with a website that is not found in search results or found many pages behind the first page.
This is the reason that our founder, Marty Smith, created a new web design firm. A firm with the mission to help customers to be found online. It is NOT as simple as designing a website and Google showing you on the first page, and your sales increase substantially.
Let me explain. Google is a large network. If you own a small business and have a local server to hold data for multiple workstations, you have to configure the server to recognize that new workstation each time you add a workstation.
To be found by the Google network, you must do the same as with the workstation. You must configure your website with the network by submitting your domain name and the XML sitemap to Google. It will take a few days for them to recognize and add your site to the network. Then the position of your website solely relies on the quality of your website.
The quality of your website has very little to do with the appearance. The most important factor is the content. In other words, content is words. Content, a.k.a. words, are what Google crawls and indexes. If the content does not describe who you are and what you offer and provide sufficient data about your location, your website will not rank well in search results. To add more complexity to this topic, if you are a local business with walk-in traffic, you must index your location with Google My Business.
Furthermore, if you want to be found in Bing search results, the same process applies to Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and more. Needless to say, it can take weeks or months to optimize your business website.
After properly submitting and configuring your website with multiple search engines, your website might not rank well, or it might rank well. At that point, it will depend on the quality of your hosting, design, content, etc., where your website ranks.
The most common mistakes made in website causing website to NOT BE FOUND are:
- Poor Website Hosting – cheap hosting will result in cheap SEO – budget for quality hosting.
- Insufficient content
- Content not designed using the proper keywords that consumers use to find the information they seek
- Physical location not indexed with maps
- Excessive images or JavaScript code
- Not using a good CMS system – WordPress is the most flexible
- Lack of internal links
- Missing XML sitemap
- Not properly submitting domain name to search engine (s)
- Not properly submitting an XML sitemap to search engine (s)
The most damaging and most common error made by web designers and business owners is cheap website hosting. This cannot be emphasized enough. Cheap hosting is always shared hosting. Meaning your website is using the same web server and same IP address as hundreds of others sites. If one website is a casino or porn site, the search engines will blacklist that IP address. Therefore, in short, another website can damage your search engine rankings.
This topic is beyond the scope of a single blog article. We have expanded to this extent to illustrate the complexity of this topic. It is not easy, it can take time, but it can be achieved with patience and the proper budget.
Feel free to browse our website, our news articles to discover more information about our online strategies to achieve these goals.
For more information call +1 314-808-1870