Actually, the most basic tactics can have a significant effect on your websites search engine position. At the top of the search engine positions however, a massive effort is required to see even the tiniest change in rank.



The challenge is how to integrate the intensive overhauls required to reach top search engine position ranking, while not compromising the design of your site? That bring us to the question do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines?

Planning Your Site

Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules when implemented correctly result in top search engine position. If your designer and SEO are not the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship from the initial development stage of your site.

For high organic search engine position you will have to search engine optimize your website. Using advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities that also support your SEO efforts.

Traffic vs. Design Importance

Most of the time efforts to have good design and high traffic are in conflict. So you have an idea of what you want your site to look like. Splash pages, cool flash and graphics immediately come to mind, but wait can these features be justified knowing that from an SEO perspective they will keep your search engine position low? If you want a successful online presence, you will have to make some compromises on design in favor of SEO.

Before beginning any effort to build a successful website you must establish exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Is your website an extension of your existing brand that must reflect the same design?

Who is its audience and what is the goal of your website? Is it to reach new clients, venture into yet untapped market segments or is it for existing clients to see?

How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Planning is import and chances are you will not initially have all the answers. No problem because it will at least give you a starting point for your designer/SEO to develop a solution for you.

SEO vs. Attractive Design

Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship.

Lets look at a simplified example of this. Say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, banana bread recipe.

From a design standpoint Banana Bread Recipe would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps a yellow color. And lets add a fine, black rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing "Banana Bread Recipe" needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of banana bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words - banana bread recipe.

Search engines do not like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that extra code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank. If you didn't use CSS, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table.

The less programming code you have on your website, the better your chances for high search engine position. In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It will not read through page after page of unimportant code to find the relevant text.

Do Not Ignored Creating Good Design

If you have an existing site, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business. The reasons for doing so are valid, and can not simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a search engine first page position.

To correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization you must focus on content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text. You are not alone if you have this disheartening thought -- if I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one search engine position will my site be so stale and boring that I am embarrassed to send people there?

Do not despair because there are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that the first option is not us, lets look at the second option. It is quite basic and begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques.

You do not have to be a big company or have multi million dollar advertising accounts to succeed. You only must be thoughtful, plan adequately and when possible use professional SEO services.