Why a Search Engine Optimized Website is Important

In our personal experience, one of the most overlooked factors when choosing a web design firm is on-site search engine optimization. Many clients are often looking for simply the best price possible, thinking that all that really matters is how the end result looks. Believe it or not, we’ve had many clients who have wanted fancy, uncommon fonts – which would have required images for many pieces of text. We’ve also had clients who’ve insisted that the few extra hours we add to our proposals to ensure that a design is 100% visible to Google is unnecessary because he or she has an off-site search engine optimization pro that will “get the website to the top regardless”. While that may be true for keywords that are very specific and have low competition, if you’re aiming for anything better it could prove almost impossible no matter how many back-links you get.

Let’s take a look at one of our own websites for an example. BeFunGames is a fun online game site where users can compete in tournaments, win prizes and chat with the community. We launched the website on January 22nd, 2011 and right from the start we paid complete attention to every aspect of the website in terms of relevancy for our target keyword “fun games online”, “online fun games” and a few others. There are several tools that help analyze your website for relevancy like this, and believe me when I say we made sure to get a perfect rating in every single one we could find. Once we were confident that our website was literally flawless, we looked for an off-site search engine optimization partner; someone who could take the time to submit articles, build back-links and ultimately increase our authority to Google.

During our search, we talked with at least 20 different agencies. During our interviews with them, each company predicted that it would be a good 8 to 10 months at least before we would get to the first page for “fun games online” and “online fun games”. Hearing that made us somewhat disappointed, but we really wanted to  give BeFunGames a shot. So, we hired SEOPlans to handle our link-building. Believe it or not, we’re currently only in month three of off-site SEO and we’re already on page one for both of the above keywords! We’ve been able to surpass Amine’s (the owner of SEOPlans) expectations simply because Google really, really likes our website. At this point, we’re still increasing in our rankings and Google visits our site every couple of days which is extremely good.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this story, it’s that you should really analyze your potential web designers for their on-site SEO capabilities. Have them show you a couple examples of websites they’ve built that are doing great on  Google because the last thing you want is a website that doesn’t get picked up and indexed by the world’s largest traffic magnet.