What is a good website?

There is no easy answer to this one, I’m afraid. For graphic designers, artists, writers and copywriters, a great website is one that is aesthetically pleasing in site design and in web content. But what good is a beautiful website if users cannot find it over the Internet? That is why for the marketing and promotions department, a good website is one that is laden with search keywords and optimized to be located easily via the search-engine. However, cramming ten keywords into a 200-word article or developing a site layout to cater to optimization needs could sacrifice its beauty and over-all look. That is why in web development, aesthetics and SEO are like oil and water – they just do not mix.

Is there a way to bring these warring ideas together? Can beauty and SEO strike a compromise? The beauty is that function and art can go hand in hand in web development. It may not be easy, but a delicate balance can be reached between beauty and marketability.

First things first, let me give you a background on SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of driving traffic and quality viewers to a particular website via the search engine. This can be done through the maximized and effective use of targeted keywords (the words you type into that Google search box to find the information that you are looking for) that would lead online users to your site. The effective use of SEO keywords makes your site rank higher and thus, it appears first in the list of search results.

Your goal for your website is to be ranked among the first thirty page hits for a particular keyword. The reason for such is that it is a tried and tested fact that most Internet users rarely go beyond the first three pages of search results. SEO is a marketing strategy aimed at improving the probability of your site being stumbled upon by users. Efforts towards search engine optimization include improving a site’s coding, content, structure and presentation.

Since SEO is a way for your site to tell search engines and the general public on what your business is about, it is vital for you to design and write content for your website in a way that people can easily find it using the search engine. SEO can be integrated into the two main areas of web development – in the content and in the HTML code. Web developers should create the HTML code in a way that the search engines can easily find your content. It is better to do away with fancy Flash or Java acrobatics and just focus on optimizing the code. Then, the search engines can find what they are looking for.

When it comes to content, online readers can easily spot the difference between a well-written article and one that is keyword-laden for the purpose of SEO. It is better to go for quality writing than to sacrifice your prose for the sake of SEO. Being selective with the keywords to use in web content is essential. It is so much better to use focused terms as an SEO in an article than to load your written work with a chockfull of generic terms.

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