Search Engine Friendly (SEF) Website Design and Development

Whether you are interested in selling products, building a subscriber list, promoting your brand, selling your services, or any other business model…. marketing and conversion should be your number 1 goal. This is the goal of search engine optimization.

What is Your Domain Name?

Choose Your Website Name Carefully!

The very first step in web development is choosing the name of your website. Most people choose their domain URL using traditional marketing common sense. This is a big mistake. The URL is the top level of the entire website architecture. It MUST be optimized for search engines.

Don’t make the mistake of choosing what sounds good for a website name based on common sense. The wrong choice will set back your SEO efforts to where the content and optimization of the entire website must work to overcome the shortcomings of your domain name.

Due to the natural tendencies of link-building and off-page optimization your good or bad choices in determining a website name will have a snowballing effect in the search engines. With my help, you can get the snowball going the right way and turbo boost the results of your website’s SEO efforts.

Website Architecture and Menu Structure

What Web Pages Go Where?

As far as search engines are concerned, the rest of your website architecture follows the same rules as the domain name URL… but there are added levels of control and strategies for each page within your website structure.

Establishing your website architecture cements your interior linking plan or strategy. Your website structure should look like a pyramid with every page chosen carefully, coinciding with your interior linking strategy.

This is also the time to decide which pages are for humans, but not spiders. Certain pages should be blocked from the search engine crawlers, spiders and robots. There should be a clear and concise optimized path for search engines to follow. Some pages will appear as noise to the search engines and will hurt your website rankings. Yet these pages may be necessary for your human users …your customers …your market.

Graphic Layout and Web Design

Website Usability and Branding Essentials

For some web designers, it can be easy to get carried away with infinite creative ideas, with little regard for SEO. Other creative artists tend to leave a job incomplete. And some artists just don’t get the point of marketing.

To end up with a good end product, you need to start with a plan. Define goals and requirements. Don’t assume your web designer knows what every website should have.

Requirements should always include:

• Easy to read typography that moves the reader along at a quick, internet-surfing pace.
• Color pallet that supports corporate identity and branding colors.
• Visible on a 1024 x 768 pixel monitor – substantial content must reside above the fold (on screen before scrolling)
• Quick page load times – there are countless online tools available to check if a page is acceptable.
• Menus and navigation clearly visible

Goals should be marketing oriented. Define calls to action and conversions such as:

• Close online sales
• Capture name & email for subscriber list
• Call phone number
• Join community

Blend Starts With the End

BlendSEO starts with your end goal to determine the website content optimization and website architecture.