When we talk about SEO design, we mean getting your site right in terms of its design for SEO purposes. When it comes to search engine optimisation, google, yahoo and bing (the three big players) want to see that your website is well optimised, structured and full of good content for visitors. You’ll hear me talk a lot about user experience and this is a fundamental point on two main levels.

First of all, your design needs to be good enough for people to feel welcome. What’s more, you want them to come back and they are not going to do so if they cannot find what they want quickly. You should also get a ‘positive end result’ out of as many visitors as you can and this means a telephone call, contact form submission or other form of inquiry. If your site design is not quite right, then it is unlikely to yield positive results for you.

The ‘big picture’ to all this is being able to provide visitors with something of great value, both in terms of information and associated products and services. The thing is, if you have great information and come across as knowing what you are talking about then more visitors will assume that your products and services will follow suit.

This means a good design and structure to your main pages – those pages where most of the interest and revenue should come from. I am doing a lot of work in this area today and this includes basic changes to the client’s design for their main pages. At the moment they have about 30 key pages which are not that well optimised. However, there is loads of good quality text on them. We need to show visitors a simple way of getting to these main pages by producing a better (but subtle) call to action. This involves some redesigning as well as better placement of images and links. Later on we can concentrate on optimising each page more effectively for their chosen keywords.

When you take another look at your website, see it from a fresh perspective. Imagine you are a potential customer and you are seeing it for the first time. What would you want to see first on the home page and the other 30 main product/service pages? Would this include live help, a telephone number, download page, applications, video, feedback, related community tools and other resources.

Think about what they want to see and if you don’t know, ask them. Seriously, call two of your best clients and ask them to take a look at your web design. Then ask them what they were looking for and how easy it was for them to find it. They’ll appreciate the fact that you contacted them and they’ll also see that you are trying to improve things for your customers.