How To Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

For your website to reach the level desired of search engine positioning, you need to hire a SEO specialist to be responsible for the optimization.

Almost all web sites are likely to be optimized so that they can improve their positioning in search engines and attract more visitors. However, conventional sites, those with poor graphic design or with technology used inappropriately, are not good candidates for an optimization project because in many cases it’ll be more expensive and difficult to optimize sites like that than just redesigning them completely from scratch. By contrast, large websites, those that exceed a hundred pages of content, are the most attractive for an optimization project, because they are the most likely to succeed and the ones that can offer the best return on investment.

A high percentage of large websites suffer from an ineffective promotional strategy and thus search engine performance is still being underachieved. That is, since they do not meet the standards required by the search engines, the ranking of these websites are so low that their pages are difficult to locate through Google, Yahoo and Bing, which are the three major search engines worldwide.

Evaluation by a SEO specialist

To determine how feasible is to optimize a website for search engine positioning, you need a SEO specialist (search engine optimization specialist) make a technical evaluation of this taking into consideration the many factors that come into play in determining the positioning in search results pages. If you are lucky, your website will be good enough to be optimized to achieve the desired visibility, which will be undoubtedly good news. But in any case a search engine optimization project will be as cheap as you surely want it to be.

An optimization project must be implemented by SEO specialists. An agency that is not professional will only get you into more trouble. In fact, many web design projects are from the beginning intended to achieve search engine optimization, but because there is no specialist agency hired, the project ends in failure and the objective is limited to just have a presence on the Internet, which becomes a conflict for you, since is difficult to justify the poor results to the steering committee of your company.

Optimizing large websites for search engines

In the case of a large website, the designer most likely selected a development tool for creating dynamic websites, such as PHP, ASP, JSP or CFScript, among others, and if the optimization is complex but feasible. In fact, a large percentage of dynamic websites with content stored in databases are developed in PHP and MySQL, two industry-leading technologies and the most used.

If you or design agency either independently or in coordination, for some reason decided to use a framework (development platform) for the website creation, such as Adobe Flex, ASP.net, Struts, Coldspring, JavaServer Faces or Ruby on Rails, the positioning will remain viable but in this case the complexity of the optimization project will be much higher and equally the resources to be invested in the project.

It is important to understand that in all these cases, regardless of the technology that has been used, the SEO specialist responsible for the optimization project will inevitably have to check and understand the structure, standards and logistics within your website before they can make a change in the code, which sometimes is not easy. For this reason, a search engine optimization project is not economic.

An expert in, for example, Adobe Flex, who is also a SEO specialist, is hard to find around the corner. However, if you are looking to promote your business through your website and decided to build your website using any of these platforms, then you must be willing to hire a specialist familiar with both technologies.

Optimizing sites developed in Flash

For those companies whose websites have been developed in movie formats (Flash), I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Google and Adobe have made great efforts recently because websites developed in Flash can be indexed by the search engine and achieve some visibility. For just over a year, Google began, and likely also Bing and Yahoo did, to index sites with this technology with better results. The bad news is that this process is in its infancy and there are still many points to be solved to make a site designed in Flash achieve the level of positioning that the customer wants.

Selecting the appropriate technology

Do not be swayed by marketing or allow people to build false needs on you to make you buy way too sophisticated technologies. There are situations where a platform like Joomla, a solution compatible with search engines a hundred percent, can be used in the project to design and position the website without major complications, resulting in development costs affordable for many companies.

However, if you do not have a choice, either because the website is already established or a decision by a particular development platform was already taken, you have to necessarily look for a SEO specialist who knows about it or is willing to get to know such technology to carry out the optimization work.

Take into account that optimization is a remedy, in the sense that you have to repair something that is wrong or incomplete. It is advisable to design and implement a positioning strategy from the very beginning to avoid having to undergo a complete redesign of the website for optimization after it was already published.

Once you open the hundred, two hundred or three hundred gates of your website to receive that amount of visitors, mostly potential customers, then you may conclude that the investment in the search engine optimization project was worthwhile.

RELATED POSTS

About the Blog Author: Timpa has the mission of providing all entrepreneurs, whether experiencied or not in online business strategies, with the right information to help them manage their businesses online in the best, most time-effective and cost-effective, smarter way.