Why is SEO (and SEO friendly web design) important?

Well, if you want more and relevant traffic to your website – YOU NEED SEO.
Another simple logic is “The more customers walk into your shop, the more sales you will make.” SEO points more potential customers towards your shop.
SEO has become ‘de rigueur’ for anyone who does business online. It would be foolish not to employ best practice in site design and content creation for your website, leveraging all the tools available such as Google Analytics, Trends and AdWords to find out what people are actually searching for.

There are a few key things that are important to have a website designed in a way that is SEO friendly giving your business an opportunity to get traffic.

• CSS Web Design. As the first step towards achieving good SEO results, you need a good web design that has been built completely in CSS. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (look and feel) of a web page written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML. The separation of web site’s content from website’s presentation empowered by CSS, does not just improves content visibility by the search engines immensely but also provides more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable all the pages on the website to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. It also means that a lot of space is not taken by the traditional HTML code (in the table structure) at the top of the page as the CSS code can be kept in a separate file. This allows the search engines like Google to get to the content easily and quickly as the spiders can read the content fast in the case of a CSS web design.
• Minimize the usage of flash. Flash designs can be attractive and appear cool but are you losing business because your website is in flash? The answer is probably ‘Yes’ as millions of users who might be looking for your services or products cannot find your website on search engines. Yes – Search engines are almost BLIND to flash (even though Google is making efforts to read and index flash) and cannot read any of the content in flash. And what they cannot read, they will not show in their results. So avoid whole websites in flash. Definitely avoid content in flash. A image rich flash banner in an otherwise text rich website should be fine.
• All the tags are important. Pay attention to all the tags – starting with the title tags of all pages on the website. A good web design means that all pages have all the tags and the values should not just be keyword rich but also unique for all the pages. Google and all other search engines will read all the tags on your website pages and store them in their databases. Ensure that all pages on your website have at least these tags with relevant and unique values  Title tag, Description tag, Keywords tag etc.
• Search Engine friendly URLS. For a good web design this is hugely important to have search engine friendly URLS. Most of the times, this is an extra feature for which web design companies will charge extra. But, be willing to pay for this feature as this can give a huge boost to your search engine rankings. This web design feature is worth many times its cost and any professional SEO company would recommend this to you. Example: A normal URL for a product page – www.xyz.com/product.php?12&asjh&765&oyg+23-hguig&trd65 and compare this to a SEO friendly URL – www.xyz.com/products/teakwood_dining_table which straightaway tells the search engines such as Google and Yahoo that this page provides information about teakwood dining table. Hence, the search engines will show this page in the results whenever someone is searching for ‘teakwood dining table’.
• Text link navigation. Ensure that your website design has a text link navigation rather than a graphical navigation. Search engines will not be able to read the graphical images and will not know what the web page being linked to is about. Whereas, text links can be read by the search engines and provide relevance to all the pages on your website.

To have a search engine friendly or Google friendly website design is an important prerequisite of a successful SEO campaign. Before SEO can be professionally implemented on your website, you need a SEO friendly Web Design.

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