There’s a real conundrum for website design and development agencies and their clients. Clients (and presumably the users of their websites) absolutely love clean, simple, beautifully designed home pages. Unfortunately, Google hates them. Well, they don’t really hate them, per se, but they do ignore them, largely because there is no text. Google search algorithms are based on text. If your site’s home page is produced in flash or has no text, Google bots can’t see it.
There are some website design and development agencies who are beginning to acknowledge this fact. However, if you look at the Webby Awards – what many think of as the Oscars of the Internet – it’s still very clear that the clean, text free look is what the so called top tiered web design agency is going for.
If you’re a huge national or international brand that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on traditional advertising, you can probably forgo all that text on your home page. That’s because the big companies also spend millions on Google Ad Words and they are rewarded for that by Google who moves them up on their search pages accordingly.
But, if you’re a little guy and you need your site to generate leads or sales for your products and services, your idea of what a properly designed website should be better include lots of text that is properly laden with keyword and keyword phrases that are applicable to the products and services you sell.
Ah… but before you start typing away and throwing up gobs of text onto your homepage you need to understand that you’ll need to be working with a web design agency that understands SEO, design and how the two can live in harmony to get you reach your search engine results page goals, while also keeping your website visitors interested in what they’re viewing on your site.
Finding the Web Design Agency that’s right for you.
Of course, there are lots of ways to find website design and development agency, word of mouth, online directories, etc. But, this is one place where Google can lead you directly to a web design agency. In fact, simply search “web design agency,” or “website design and development agency” and the top three or four search results will have a pretty good knowledge of Search Engine Optimization simply because they’ve reached such lofty positions for the keywords you’re searching under. One thing you should never do is ask a website design and development company to tell you about their search capabilities. They will all tell you they are experts at SEO which can mean anything from having used Google to do searches themselves, to hiring freelance SEO experts.
Once you’ve done your keyword search and select 4-5 possible candidates, the real work can begin. Look at their sites, and the sites of their clients. In fact do searches using the appropriate keywords for their client’s businesses. If you search and their clients rarely show up in the first couple of search engine results pages, you know it’s time to move on.
