Search Engine Friendly Web Site Design
Professional Web Site Design and Development

Introduction
To make a difference to your customer and to your profit, your web site must connect with its desired target market. To do that, you must have visibility in the search engines. Covenant Designs' develops web sites that are search engine friendly.

Just what is a search engine friendly web design? Search Engine friendly means that the web site we develop will cooperate with the way search engine spiders index sites. That means your web site's information will be found by searchers.

To maximize the potential of a search engine friendly web site design, we can add search engine optimization and / or search engine positioning. These search engine marketing strategies aggressively push for optimum viability to the markets that form your best prospects.

Integrated Development
Many businesses make the mistake of not integrating their Search Engine Marketing with their Website Design. As such, many search engine marketing consultants have seen their client's rankings plummet after a web site redesign. Vise versa, many designers have seen their exceptionally created and beautiful web site designs destroyed by a SEO optimization.

This does not have to happen — don't fix one part while damaging another aspect of your marketing! You need coordination from an integrated marketing communications company like Covenant Designs who is versed in all skill sets required for success.

Web Site Design or Search Engine Optimization — which one serves the greater purpose? The search engine optimizer will argue: what good are great looking, flash-enabled, and graphic-heavy web sites if no one will ever find and appreciate them.

The web site designer will counter with: what good are web sites capable of attracting 1,000 new visitors a week if not one visitor sticks around long enough to convert into a customer.

The fact is that the search engine optimizer and the web site designer are both vital to your web site's success.

When an Internet searcher enters a keyword or key-phrase into Google, Yahoo!, or any other search engine, they want relevant results. That same Internet searcher, when visiting your website, expects a clear presentation of your products and services.

A search engine friendly design is nothing more than a well-balanced combination of both search engine optimization and professional web site design. In addition, a search-engine friendly web site should also be in tune with your ideal client. It is important that every page of the web site be designed and written from a marketing communications standpoint that serves the visitor's desires and needs while simultaneously accomplishing your marketing goals.

A truly professional web site development company, one who designs with what search engines are looking for in mind, can design web sites without compromising either appearance, usability or search engine friendliness.

Free Search Engine Friendly Development Tips
Text vs. Images - Search engines are blind to layout and pictures. Amateur web site designers, add creative elements to a web site's look while unknowingly hindering its findability.

This is why you need a search engine marketing consultant to advise your development team. As a good search engine marketing consultant already knows, it is very important to develop and maintain a web site that has plenty of content, enriched with relevant keywords.

Navigation Menus - Web site navigation schemes, such as JavaScript drop-down menus or Flash banners, can help create a distinct and visually pleasing web site Unfortunately, these same creative elements also make it extremely difficult or impossible, for search engines to properly crawl the web site— limiting the web site's search engine exposure.

'There are, of course, solutions to this that will appease both the web site designer and search engine optimizer. As a suggestion, consider using standard rollovers and/or CSS formatting to develop a graphically pleasing navigation menu. These web site practices will not obscure your web site's links, allowing search engines to freely crawl and index your web sites pages.

If a JavaScript navigation menu is truly needed to attain the desired look and feel of your web site, than consider adding text-based links elsewhere on your web site's pages, such as the bottom. Bottom navigation schemes consisting of text-based links are becoming very common now-a-days, as they ultimately provide your web site's visitors, and search engines, with another source for navigating. Another suggestion is to include a site map containing all of your web site's pages.

Flash vs. HTML - Flash is a pain in the sides of all SEO companies, but it doesn't have to be. It is possible to mix Flash elements with HTML to create a search engine friendly web site that still allows for a rich media experience.

Dynamic Web Sites - the use of dynamic web sites can either be a great thing or a terrible thing depending on how your particular system is configured and how your web site's dynamic pages are created. Because dynamic web pages are data-based driven and are created on the fly, they are usually assigned URLs containing very large programming parameters. These parameters make it very difficult for many search engines to crawl, follow, or index your web site's pages.

Covenant Designs suggests consulting with your development team, and your search engine marketing company, and have them consider developing your content management system using either ASP (Active Server Pages) or CFM (Cold Fusion). These 'dynamic scripting languages allow your dynamically-driven web pages to be indexed.

Conclusion
Integrated Marketers who understand these and other common search engine friendly design issues are capable of designing around them, without sacrificing your design or future search engine rankings. When the web site designer and the search engine optimizer come together — as they do at Covenant Designs — than developing a successful web site at every level becomes a reality.

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