Website Design and Architecture For Marketing

Well I have a great looking website but no visitors! This is a scenario I hear time and time again. Not from sites that I have designed but sites designed by someone without any search engine knowledge. Website architecture is a key element in Search Engine Ranking. If your designer does not know this you are in trouble. If you are planning on people just typing in your web address to find your site then it does not matter. However most websites depend on search engine traffic from sites like Google. So knowing a few things will help you design a search engine friendly website or asking a few basic questions will help you avoid hiring the wrong designer.


So how does the Search Engine index my sites pages and how does it find those pages to index? Site submittion and indexing is different for each search engine or directory. Let's focus on Google the top dog. Google sends out a program or "spider" to crawl your website. You can manually submit your site to Google, one page at a time or with a "Site Map" which is a page linked to every page on your site. Make sure all of your pages can eventually be found from your index or main home page. This does not mean link to every single page from the home page but create a simple path.
So now that Google has found your page what are they looking for. This is a very complex question which will be explained in articles to follow, however here are a few simple tips. Use keyword as links to link your pages together. The spider does not see images so an image button will be followed but the keyword link is best. So use text in your html not graphics. Don't use a splash page! A slash page with a big picture and the words "Enter Here" is one of the biggest amateur mistakes. When Google spiders your main page it reads the keywords and finds "enter here" and that's it.
So ask your designer about site architecture and Search Engine Optimizing. Ask to see top ranking websites they have designed and you will know right away if this designer can cut the mustard.
Stay tuned for more info.

Pay Per Click Search Engines
Information and advice about the pay-per-click search engines like Overture and Google AdWords.