Have you ever heard the saying “Design follows copy”? If not, you need to! What content is on your site will dictate design, and you should never have the design of your website done before you have copy! But one of the most important parts of content is SEO, and if your design isn’t good for SEO it’s not going to help you make money online. But, hey, who cares about SEO? Here’s why you should:

There are two sites online that are selling personal security products like hidden cameras. One retailer has opted for a CMS called OpenCart but never bothered to implement even basic SEO on his website design; the second retailer is using WordPress with an SEO suite that makes sure all of his pages are tagged correctly, that his keyword appears 3-4% of the time on every page, and that high PR websites get pinged from time to time. The first retailer fails and never gets customers to his site because no one knows he’s even there. The second retailer who paid attention to SEO and worked hard to get in the good graces of the search engines like Google and Bing is highly successful.

When you pay attention to SEO, you’ll be able to be successful online. But how do you know what you’re doing is right, and what is SEO anyway?

What is SEO?

SEO is a set of different methods that get you link love from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines! When you play by their rules, you’ll start showing up for your keywords and get much more traffic than if you just handed out business cards and hoped that people just come to your site on their own.

What do SEO and Design Have to do with Each Other?

Web Design and SEO seem like their worlds apart,  but they’re not! Design is the visual representation of your site, but design alone can’t drive sales and signups. SEO pushes people to your website, but if your site looks cheap no one is going to buy anything. These two things work together in tandem so you’ll be able to get the results you need to be successful online. You can’t be successful with a pretty site and no SEO, and you won’t be able to drive sales with great SEO and an ugly site. You’ll want to make sure both of these are taken care of before you launch your website.

What is Good Design?

Now that you know what good SEO is, you need to know what good design is:

• Appealing to your audience
• Good navigation and clean coding (loads quickly and people can find their way around)
• SEO optimised content
• Images that are tagged and relevant to the website
• Prominent logo and contact information

Your design should put your potential buyers at ease. With great web design, great SEO and all the information they need about your product at their fingertips, they have no excuse not to buy!

Every year brings new challenges in the SEO game, and 2012 is no different. Instead of losing ground, what if you had a cheat sheet of everything you needed to watch out for the upcoming year? Here we’re going to go over the top four ways to supercharge your website’s SEO efforts and stay ahead of the next Panda Update! A lot of the tips are common sense stuff none of us just never think about, but you’re going to find a surprise in here too. Keep reading and learn more!

Step Up Your Content

The next phase of Google’s Panda is focusing more on relevance than keyword densities. You’ll want to stop being a slave to the three percent rule and working towards making sure your site has interesting content that you yourself would want to actually read. The more relevant the content, the better you’re going to rank in the search engines. While you’ll still want to focus on keywords, make sure you mix it up in each article (and if you have a lot of articles, find a lot of keywords!)

Watch the Trends

Watching what trends are coming onto the scene will help you be more successful. You may not want to spend the time to keep track of things, but it beats shelling out thousands of dollars every month to an SEO company who knows what you’re doing better than you do!

Be Compatible

If you want to get more eyeballs on the page, you’re going to have to make sure your site is utilising HTML5 so you can get on as many different devices and browsers as possible. You’ll also want to make sure that you code is clean and small as possible, so the pages load as fast as they can. While everyone has broadband, some people are on mobile phones and the longer it takes for things to load is time that they can just go find another site that loads up on time.

Know Your Friends

Where you’re linking in and out of are going to reflect back on you more than ever, so you need to pay more attention to where your links are going to and where they’re coming in from. If most of your inbound links are coming from content farms like Ezinearticles (it’s okay if some, just not all) you may be in trouble. You’ll also want to make sure you’re not linking to low quality sites or their bad reputation can rub off on you.

Know Your Enemies

You need to pay more attention to what your competition is doing, and you’ll want to copy their better tactics. It’s not exactly cheating to do keyword research off your competitors’ sites, and you’ll also want to pay attention to what kind of content they’re putting out there too.

Now you know everything you need to turbocharge your site for 2012! Focus on evergreen content, work towards having better links, and be compatible with more browsers and devices.

When you’re ready to bring your website to the next level, you’re ready to learn more about SEO services and web designing services. Having a website online is just part of the success puzzle, you’ll need to make sure you have a great design and SEO services to promote your site in the search engines where your customers are already looking for you! Why advertise when people are already looking for you, and all you have to do is let them know that you’re there?  Here we’re going to go over everything YOU need to know to be successful online, so let’s get started!

Web Designing Services

There are as many companies online offering web designing services as there are websites! You’ll be able to find great deals, but you’ll want to make sure that the person working on your custom website design knows what they’re doing; see if they have examples and references to show you who they’ve worked for, as well as some helpful information for you (like we do!) to better understand the design process.

A good grasp of user interface design (making the flow of information easier for people to use, for example the navigation menus) and colour theory will go a long way towards making your web design a great one! Each niche and industry will have certain colours that will make it resonate with your target audience, and negative colours that will turn them off as soon as they get to the site.

SEO Services

SEO and web design are very different; a web design is how your site looks, and SEO is how people find your site. If you write a lot of articles about shoes for example on your website, Google will think you’re a shoe site. If you target these keywords in a certain way along with different ones related to the topic, these are known as LSI keywords. LSI keywords help the search engines like Google know that a human wrote this content and that it’s actually a site worth seeing.

There are many kinds of SEO services online, and each business’ needs will be different. You may already rank for one keyword but want to start pulling people in with other search keywords, or maybe you just need good content for your site. You’ll want to talk to the company before you hire them and see if they have examples of keywords that they brought to the front page of Google, and if they have any former clients that you can talk to.

Professional Services Help Your Site

Professional services help your website get seen; if you have great SEO people will be able to find your site much faster and trust you more, and when you have a good graphic design you’ll be able to show people you’re serious about your online business. When you’re ready to make the jump to a professional website, invest in SEO services and a great web design to set you apart from your competitors!

Looking back at how SEO and Website Design worked in the past, it’s insane how hard it is now to get your website seen. If you want to know where SEO is going in the future, you’re going to have to understand how it started. Here we’re going to go over what’s changed, what will change and how you can stay ahead of the curve and avoid some of the rougher spots with all of the SEO and design problems the rest of us have had to deal with! Let’s get started.

In the Beginning it was Easy!

In the beginning of the internet, it was easy, but it was also filled with adult website links. You could look for anything innocuous and sweet, like children’s clothes for example, and you would somehow still come up with something in the adult industry. You could stuff your site full of keywords and game the algorithm of the search engines of the day. While it was easier back then to get ranked, the design was flawed; I think we would all take the internet of today over Geocities any day!

Design was another problem altogether on the past internet, even up until web 2.0 began to emerge back in 2006-2007. People had to stumble around tables and try and figure out how to place information where their visitors would actually be able to see them. There weren’t that many different types of browsers, but the ones we had were hit and miss.

And Now… It’s Hard

SEO for the current iteration of the internet is hard, but design isn’t nearly as hard as it once was. We have WordPress with drag and drop theme design, we have tons of theme repositories if we don’t care about having a cookie cutter theme, and we have the W3C organisation that holds sway over design standards. The internet is a prettier and friendlier place, graphically speaking, and we have the first internet to thank for it.

SEO is a bit more of a bear when you think about it. You can’t just load up your website with invisible keyword pages at the bottom, and you can’t use redirecting tricks like they used to. But you do have a much larger audience to draw from, and all the perks that the social web can give you! Sharing your website with the masses is easier today than it ever was before, and if you want to get the word out you have so many tools at your disposal today that you wouldn’t have had previously.

While search engine optimization might be hard, virtually anyone can make a website, buy a domain and have everything up in a matter of hours. Who knows what it’s going to be like in a matter of five years from now, but if this big leap forward is any indication the next jump in the web is going to be fantastic, but only time will tell!