Mike Maher

When creating (or fixing, changing etc.) a website, the first thing to be aware of is your website’s design and content and its direct relation to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Knowing how to effectively and efficiently design your website is crucial to its success. Before you start to worry about how a reader or potential client is going to react to your website, you have to make sure they find it. If you’re just starting out, make sure that your design enables search engine spiders everything they are looking for in the quickest but most organized manner. Keep it simple, brief, relevant, orderly, and attractive. An effective small business search engine optimization is key to early success.

Flashing images, music, auto-play videos, and other effects may sound and look exciting, but they often just get in the way and are detrimental to the quality of your website and its design. Just as your site should be designed for search engines to scan it, it should also do the same thing for readers. Short, indented (or listed) paragraphs with frequent break points to make it easier to scan and read, not to mention increasing its visual appeal.

Don’t understand? Copy and paste this entire article into a word document, delete all indentations and paragraph breaks, and then ask yourself: “Would I waste my time reading that?” Exactly, you wouldn’t, and neither will someone visiting your website.
Once you have your website designed in an effective manner, your next step is making sure you have the right content on there. Your quality design and organization will go for naught if you don’t keep your target audience in mind. Five paragraphs and five hundred words about mountain bikes won’t do much to bring people to your restaurant (or other small business, assuming that’s why you’re making the website). Stay relevant and identify your audience, but also keep your message universal. Avoiding slang and jargon is a good initial way to keep your content universal and optimized.

Most small business websites will use static pages (pages that need to be manually changed or updated), and it is important to keep the pages up to date. If a potential customer visits your site and sees information dated two weeks ago, he/she probably won’t stick around very long to see what else your site has to offer. Make sure that you are committed to keeping your site updated or have someone reliable in place to update it for you.

For example, a quick visit to www.burkestavernpa.com is a perfect guide to what the small business owner does not want to do. Not only is the homepage of the site unattractive and largely useless, but also the last update was over six months ago. This leaves the prices, product listings, menu, newsletter and promotions incredibly outdated. A “Happy Valentine’s Day” message doesn’t do much for small business in August.

Remember, the most important thing is making your small business web design attractive to search engines. SEO is the best way to increase traffic to your site, which is the first step in the right direction. If your site has a high SEO ranking, it’s already doing a lot of things right.

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