If you want your website to work well with search engines, then you must ensure that your web designer knows about how search engines work and knows how he should write your site so as to ensure it ranks as well as possible over time.

A business website should act as another member of its sales team, bringing in leads to your business to then be converted into sales. The job of a website is to appear in the path of traffic that are looking for the services your company provides and to then convert that traffic into a sale, an enquiry or at least a sign up to the newsletter.

List building is an important sales aspect, but the main purpose of your site is to sell your company’s product or service. The primary call to action on your site is to do exactly that, sell what you sell. However if the lead decides not to buy what you want to sell them, you should then ask them to sign up to your newsletter.

Basic web design is also very important. So often we see sites that look visually fantastic, but due to being designed as one piece of flash, are totally unsuitable to be optimized. Effective search engine optimization relies upon many on page factors being present. The basics of the search engines operation depends upon the search engine being able to read your page. A search engine can only read the words that you place on the page, if you want to rank for Fish tank but the words do not appear anywhere on your page, how can you expect a computer to know that is what you wish to rank for?

There are over 100 on-page factors that search engines look at to determine what keywords to rank you for and each factor adds extra weight to how dedicated your site is to that keyword. Badly made sites are diluted with many keywords only written once, and so search engines often do not rank them well. Site building software like Joomla is usually very limited in what you can tweak to make your site readable to a search engine.

If you are serious about getting to the top of a search engine ranking to get the most from your site, then it is important to do some research of your own into SEO first before you commit to paying thousands of pounds for a website to ensure that you dont end up with something that will never perform well in search engines.

A lot of web designers are still fairly ignorant to SEO and so continue to design and deliver websites that are never going to make anyone any money.