Why Your Web Design Company Must Respect SEO

Now more than ever, most website design companies are adding SEO to their web design packages that they offer. The problem is that many of these self-proclaimed SEO and web design firms fail to fully understand the nature of search engine optimization, and how certain SEO elements apply to a website's back-end.
It is absolutely critical that your web design company knows the basics of SEO while putting together a website. Respecting the ever-so important SEO-friendly website elements of a site is imperative during the web design process. In this post, we discuss the specific aspects that web design companies need to be aware of when building sites with SEO in mind.

Aspects of SEO to Consider for Web Design

Designing and developing a well-optimized website must take into consideration the overall architecture, content structure, and back-end code of a site, or HTML. This includes aspects of both the on-page and off-page content and how it is presented on each page of the website.
The off-page SEO aspects of a webpage are the page's title and meta description. These critical content components should be presented as early as possible in HTML code of each page. The page title defines that page (and typically always includes a keyword phrase for SEO), so early reference of these elements is very important. The on-page elements of a webpage need to focus on quality, keyword optimized content that other-wise "SEO-friendly." In essence, SEO-friendly on-page content is that which can be crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. On-page content elements of the like include:

• text or copy on the page that can be parsed, or highlighted 
• relevant images (including a keyword optimized "Alt" tag in each image) 
• links (preferably keyword optimized cross-links between relevant pages of the site) 
• quality videos (which can be labeled and keyword optimized prior to uploading) 

On-page content that hinders the SEO process is the infamous Flash media. Flash has a reputation for causing pages to load very slowly which inhibits search engine spiders from crawling and indexing a webpage in an efficient manner. Although Flash is attractive and many web design companies use it, Flash is consider very code-heavy and is SEO no-no.

Choose Your CMS Carefully

Many website design companies built their sites around a content management system (CMS). The coding structure behind each CMS' website is different, and many are much more SEO-friendly than others. Here are some SEO considerations to keep in mind for website content management systems:

• CMS platforms that make use of code-cumbersome nestled tables can hinder SEO performance. Find a CMS that uses CSS style sheets which is much better for search engine crawling and indexing. 
• Always choose a CMS that will allow you custom write an optimized page title and meta description for each page. 
• Avoid content management systems that auto-generate static URLs. Pick a platform that enables you to write a dynamic, keyword friendly URL for each page. 
• Some CMS platforms will enable you to perform internal linking (or cross-linking) with ease. This will help make the SEO process more efficient for deep sites with many pages. 
• Only the most highly SEO-friendly CMS platforms automatically create a XML sitemap. This feature goes above and beyond and is something to look out for.

Smartly Select a Website Design Company

If you are hiring a web design company for both website design and local SEO company services, don't hesitate to ask them highly detailed, technical questions about their processes. If they fail to comply, then they are not the right firm for you. In short, there are far too many web design companies that promote search engine optimization, and yet failed perform SEO effectively. We hope this read has enlightened you and equipped your arsenal with some solid questions in selecting a SEO and website design company you can trust.