Website Design

How To Find The Perfect Website Design or
Search Engine Optimisation Company

We give you some pointers when looking for website design or search engine marketing services. When you are looking for either of these services please be clear that many very good website design companies are no good at search engine optimisation and vice versa. So do not necessarily employ the same company to do your search engine optimisation just because they did a good job at designing your website. They maybe good at both, but many are not. They are two quite different areas and require a different set of skills and resources. Read our two guides on finding good providers of these two services.

• Finding The Right Website Design Company, Click Here
• Finding The Right Search Engine Marketing Company

Good website design starts with 3 basic principles.
Make sure your website designer develops websites which are:

1. Professional looking
2. Easy to use
3. Quick to load

If your website does not achieve these three things, then it is unlikely to ever reach it's full potential and at worst will be a cost to your business rather than a profitable extension to it.

When you employ a website designer you need to make sure you get a designer which understands and executes these three basic principles. Make sure you have a good look at their portfolio. Also email a few of their previous clients. Ask them what they think of the service they received.

There are many good website designers out there, but there are a lot of bad ones too. Make sure you get someone who will design you a profitable website and give you good technical support once the site is up and running.

Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click Advertising

Once you have a website which you are ready to market you will need to find someone to help you get it on page one of the three major search engines; Google, Yahoo and MSN. The market share each of these search engines has is in that order. Google is the number one. It accounts for about 80% of all searches.

There are two ways of getting ranked on the search engines. One is to use pay per click advertising and the other is to optimise your website to rank in the natural listings. To read about the difference between the two click here.

Often companies good search engine optimisation are good at pay per click management, but this does not necessarily follow so please do not assume one follows the others. When looking for a company to provide these services you will need to do a little research and then make a short list of companies to interview. First lets deal with search engine optimisation.

A good search engine optimisation company should have:

1. It's own website ranked reasonably well for keywords such as their county plus
2. Their own website with a page rank of at least PR4. You can check page rank of a website in your Google Toolbar. This can be downloaded at http://toolbar.google.com
3. A list of at least 3 websites they have optimised which rank well for keywords which are useful to that website and are not to obscure. Get a portfolio of websites from the company and positions those website rank for in Google. Then check them in Google and see how many websites are listed for those keywords. You can see the number of sites listed for the kywords you searched for in the top right of the page on Google. Under 1 million sites is very low, 1million to 3 million is still fairly low, 3 million to 10 million is moderately competitive, 10 - 80 million is competitive and anything above this is high.

Regarding employing an SEO company also:

1. Phone or email the companies that own these websites on the portfolio to see what they thought of the SEO companies services. This will also ensure that you know they did optimise the website and not just taking credit for another companies work.
2. Do not buy optimisation services from a company that promises you page 1 of Google. There are lots of unethical search engine optimisation companies which make promises they cannot keep. Virtually all, if not all ethical search engine optimisation companies will not make these type of promises as there is never any guarantee. Search engine optimisation is the art of playing the search engines at convincing them to rank your website for certain keyphrases. A good search engine optimisation company will say we expect or are confident we can help you, but we cannot guarantee it.
3. Read up on SEO on forums and guides on the internet that talk about this subject. you will find loads of them on search engines. Get a bit of an idea of what is involved. You do not need to be an expert, just well informed.
4. With your new knowledge of SEO make sure you ask the company plenty of questions before employing them to provide this service for you.

A good Pay Per Click Management company should be Google Adwords Qualified. Read up a bit on the internet about managing an Adwords account and pay per click advertising with other search engine networks. Then when you ask them questions you will have a good idea of what to ask and what the answers should be.

When buying website design, SEO or pay per click management services always remember, just because they started off doing a good job does not mean they will continue to do a good job. Do not be afraid to get a new company to provide these services if you feel they are no longer up to scratch. Just because they are nice people does not mean they are giving you value for money. Always review the services they are providing you periodically.