Design and seo
Being a web designer myself, I know firsthand what they teach you incollege about being a good designer. While I learned all of theimportant design concepts like color theory, the importance of graphicsand white space, ect ect, I came away knowing nothing about how toactually design a site to get ranked in the search engines.
Because of the lack of training in design schools, there are many,many web design companies out there today that know nothing aboutdesigning a web page properly.
It wasn`t until I started doing some research that I realized therewas a whole world of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that Ididn`t know about. Most designers love to make your site aestheticallypleasing. Maybe they use newer technologies like Flash design or reallygraphic intensive pages. While these techniques make your site lookpretty they are not practical if you ever want a visitor to find yoursite in a search engine.
A flash source file is embedded in the html and therefore offers nocontent to which the search engine spiders can look at to rank you.Unless you are already well known in your particular industry or have avery identifiable brand (think Pepsi or BMW) then you should not use anall flash site.
First, you can create two websites for your visitors. An HTML versionand a Flash version. You can let your visitor decide where to go. Thatway you won`t leave them frustrated if they have a dial up connectionand are not surfing with broadband. There is nothing that will tickyour potential customer off faster than having to wait ten minutes justto view your fancy flash intro. By having both versions available youalso give the search engine spiders a content rich HTML site so theycan rank you accordingly.
Secondly, you can add flash components in your main site to give offsome cool effects without taking forever to download. For instance, Ihave seen a lot of websites lately where the top header portion oftheir site is made in flash or their buttons are done in flash to makethem stand out more. These are two good ways to use flash withoutoverdoing it. Just make sure that your body copy is keyword rich tooffset the flash.
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