Make informed decisions about your web design
Even if you are hiring out web design, there are certain things that you should be aware of, if only to ensure that you are getting the best quality web design for your money. If any of the following issues exist with your current website, you probably need a redesign. If you’ve signed on with a web designer who is neglecting these elements, you may want to reconsider what web design company will do your site.
- Good Site Architecture Except in rare cases, there is room for improvement if you have to click more than three times to get to any part of your website. Shallow navigation is crucial not only to your users–who probably won’t stick around long enough to get to deep pages–but also to the search engines who may not crawl your entire site.
- Unique Meta Information Each page of the website should have unique title tags and meta information. If you don’t have meta keywords tags or meta description tags in the code of your current website, it’s time to upgrade. This information is essential for the search engines to establish the relevance of your website to your focal keywords.
- Header Tags These tags appear in the body copy of your website and are also integral to establishing relevance. If your web design simply bolds headings on the page or styles them without using the header tags, you are due for an overhaul.
- Site Maps Including a site map is a very search engine specific consideration. By providing one on the home page of your website, you are effectively granting the spiders access to all layers of your website with one click. This will help ensure that they index the entire site, and not just the surface pages.
- Canonical URLs Regardless of whether your website is static or dynamic, the URLs should appear static and include the keywords that the specific pages are focusing on. This is basically web design 101, and helps both the user and the search engines.
Search Engine Friendly Web Design Companies
Many web design companies claim to offer search engine optimization as an ad-on to their design package. At Pittsburgh Design Agency, we consider SEO to be an integral part of the design process and our websites show it. We strive to walk the fine line between what users want and what the search engines require in order to provide our clients with a easily rank-able site.