Star Nine Marketing

Web Design

At Star Nine, we believe web design should focus on more than just looking good. Our number one priority when analyzing or creating a new design is efficiency. Customer conversion, convenience, and satisfaction are at the top of the list.

There is a distinct difference between quality web design and a professional design implemented with SEO in mind. While many of these changes are invisible to the naked eye, they make all the difference in ranking versus not ranking for your industry keywords. Two pages can have the exact same appearance to users, and polar opposites for an organic SEO campaign and the traffic that's being directed to your website. Your search engine marketing firm should be able to balance both while providing for a high-end user experience.

So what are some of these factors that should be considered prior to, during, and after the design of your website if you want to make the most of search engine optimization? Read further and find out.

Keywords in the domain

This is where pre-planning pays off. From the very beginning of construction on the website SEO is taken into consideration by way of keywords. The domain name alone is a big factor in the traffic a website will received based on whether or not keywords for your products and services can easily be distinguished in the title. For example, if your are a real estate broker in New York and have a company called 'Smith Urban Properties' you could have two options for a domain:

There is an advantage to using newyorkrealestate.com to rank well because when people link to your website, they will often use keywords for appropriate linking titles. Building links with 'New York Real Estate' in the anchor text is more valuable than building links titled 'Smith Urban Properties', because 'New York Real Estate' is more likely to be searched.

There is no reason not to have a website at smithurbanproperties.com as well. There are multiple approaches to maintaining your branding while choosing a relevant domain title that is more likely to get results. Speak with a consultant for more information.

Title and meta tags

Another techinique that we utilize to maximize your websites SEO is creating unique and appropriate title and meta tags for each page.

The title tag has always been key to SEO since the beginning. A title tag is the words that show up as a clickable link in a search engine page and is basically just what it says, a title for your website. Search engines need guidance to determine what your site is relevant to, and the title tag is one of the main places a search engine spiders for the relevant keywords and search result placement on search engine's sites. So, title tags need to contain specific keywords and phrases, and if a company already has a well established brand then it can also be benficial to have the name of the company in the title tag as well.

Meta tags help give the website developer control over how some search engines describe and store your website's web pages, which is referred to as indexing the web pages. Like title tags, meta tags aren't seen by the viewer on the website, rather they are written into the "head" area of web pages written into the code for browsers to read and sort. The two most common types of meta tags are keyword and description tags, both of which should contain the keywords for your website to increase the SEO potential.

If your title/meta tags are duplicated across sections of your website or are missing all together, your design is not SEO-friendly. There are many pros and pitfalls involved with title tags and meta tags. Our SEO engineers have years of experience getting them to turn out the SEO results you want.

Header tags

Using one - and only one - H1 tag on each page and appropriate H2, H3 tags is essential for letting search engines know what the important part of each page is. Header tags are written into the code of a webpage for several reasons; to structure the webpage content, to create webpage navigation that is simple, format text, and just as important, increase the website's ranking on search engines. Using headers is like creating an outline of important points, arranging content from the most important down. This means the H1 header tag is the most important tag and should be used for the most pertinent information on the webpage. This information usually correlates with the title of the page. The H2 tag, H3 tag, and so on function like sub-titles in order of relevancy to the webpage. This ranking of the header tags is where SEO comes into play. As the search engines reads these header tags it uses the information in determining the webpages relevancy and ranking for certain keywords ect. To make the most of SEO ranking keywords should be incorporated into the header tags the keywords into the header tags. Another benefit of using the proper header tags to create text headings and sub headings is that as readers scan the webpage these well worder headings will catch their eye prompting them to read further.

File structure

There is a lot to be said for file naming in your web design, but it is an element that is often over looked.

If you are designing a page to discuss Manhattan real estate, then that should be a part of the URL. Time should be taken to give each webpage within the website a unique title name that uses descriptive keywords. Not only does this give search engines yet another source for ranking your website, but it is more informative and aesthetically pleasing for users as well. You can see the difference in the example below. The first webpage address is without adding a title and second reflects a webpage that has had a specific title added to it to make it more distinct.

Are your pages static or dynamic?

A static web page, also referred to as a HTML, is one that isn't changed before they are viewed in a web browser. Dynamic pages however do experience change before they are displayed. This means that since dynamic pages aren't set up as HTML search engines can't read them, thus they can't index them. That translates into problems exposing your website on the web. It is specifically characters in the URLs of dynamic pages that block search engines from being able to read them. For this reason dynamic pages should never be used for a website's home page.

One example a problem you can run into using dynamic pages is with query strings. The URL of a webpage can contain what is called query strings which hold data to be passed along to web application programs and can be used for tracking to give dynamic pages the ability to be searched. However, if your domain is using query strings, it can lead to duplicate content issues and hurt your ranking or even get you fined. If, for example, we add a query string tracking option to the URL, it creates two distinct pages in the view of search engines for that page. You are splitting the popularity of that webpage in half as far as search engines are concerned. Inversely, query strings can sometimes have part or all of their data ignored completely by some programs. Because of these issues, this type of data should be handled with cookies and server headers instead of query string arguments where possible.

As the example above shows dynamic pages can be made "static" so that they can be read by search engines. However, this process is much more difficult and time consuming which means more expense to the client. Added to that, the fact that it can lead to duplication problems that can leave you with a hefty fine makes the appeal of static pages that much more appealing.

Are you serving multiple versions of your website?

Back in the earlier days of the internet, it was advisable to obtain multiple versions of your web domain. This is to protect the traffic that was being generated by the website, such as if the website had a domain that was easily misspelled. Many bigger corporations caught on to this and didn't want anyone doing what is called typosquatting and reaping the benefits of those who typed the domain in wrong. It was also advisable earlier on to get multiple versions of the domain to increase ranking on search engines, but that is no longer the case. Search engines are continually revising and re-regulating how they work to minimize those who webspam to get higher ranking, and serving multiple versions of your website falls into this category. If you can access your website via 'newyorkrealestate.com' and 'www.newyorkrealestate.com', that will likely be two completely different websites in the eyes of google and yahoo in order in ensure no one is benefitting in the rankings from multiple versions of a website. If a company is caught trying to do this the search engines could take action against the company and even remove the website all together from the search engine ranking, which would be completely counter-productive to what you're trying to accomplish.

However, if you still do want to obtain multiple versions of your domain you can. You just need to confirm which domain is the actual authority for the website. You can then establish another of the domain's as a subdomain. On that subdomain a 301 redirect should be implemented to confirm that it is the subdomain(s) and it will then redirect any all of the traffic for all the of related domains to the authority domain's main page.

These are only a few of the complicated factors that are analyzed by our staff to ensure that your website is built from the ground up to ensure the best SEO.

For more information about our analytics and conversion tracking services, contact us.