Choosing a web designer? Make sure he's Google friendly!

We have an old adage in internet marketing that goes as follows, "If your website can’t be found, it doesn’t matter how good your web design is." This led me to ask the following question: why do so many of our prospective and current clients say, "I’ve spent thousands with my previous web design company and I hardly appear in Google?" 

Well when choosing a web design company you may consider many factors:

• Does their design match my branding?
• How easy is it to purchase products/services?
  
• Does their price match my budget?

While these are very valid questions, if you select a web design company which has no experience of search engine optimisation, there is a chance your website could be designed in a way that prevents search engines such as Google from finding and understanding 90% of the pages on your new website - not a good start considering the investment you have just made.

The way people search online has changed in recent years and internet users are now search using very specific keyword phrases; for example, rather than searching for a ‘Sony Camera’, users may now search for ‘Sony D320 Cybershot’. You want your product pages to appear for these types of searches, but if your product pages are too many levels down from the home page, they may be ignored by Google and you will lose potential sales.

If your website is struggling to get pages listed or "ndexed" in Google, it can often be costly to fix. If you have this issue, it may be easy for your SEO consultant to advise you on how to fix it, if you need to make web design changes to your site it will be expensive to resolve.

When design problems are serious you can resolve them by:

1. employing web designer experienced at building search-engine friendly websites to resolve your issues
   
2. redesigning your website entirely - using a web designer who knows how to design for search engines
   

These design issues often occur when the web design company has had no input from any SEO specialists.

I-COM is a full service internet marketing agency with web designers and web developers working closely with SEO consultants. We are happy to answer any questions you might have about integrating SEO into your web design.

Even if you already have a web design company designing your website, I-COM can provide SEO consultancy services to ensure your website is designed for both search engines and visitors.