Being new to web design has its advantages; you aren’t caught up inside of traditional concepts, over-alluring attention grabbers, and misconceptions of search engines.

Today’s top-edge designers are bringing more relative, optimized content to the internet. We are seeking out what a client needs to get traffic on his website. Rather than creating attention-getters, we are creating attention-keepers - user friendly, search engine optimized, usually accessible, and generally clean of coding errors.

We are fresh, we are new and we are the competition. Why offer a client the option of good design or high page rank, when they can have both? Getting hits to a website is no longer the responsibility of an SEO (search engine optimization) pro - today’s top-edge designers are now required to include optimized coding that is noticed and easily read by search engine spiders. After all, what good is a website if nobody visits it? Why would a client use your services if you cannot design with good conversion in mind?

Before I got into web design, I spent three years sitting in front of my monitor, searching web content. I’ve never been a “gamer,” I’ve always been a seeker. And seeking for information, sometimes 50 pages deep into Google, I taught myself keyword discovery.

Approaching my second year of web development training, I can now code pages without any errors. I can generate a website that receives its formatting from a separate (CSS) style sheet. I can create product specific copyright, company specific design, image enhancement, and image manipulations, including Photoshop font imaging. To combine all that into a search friendly website doesn’t require rocket knowledge, the main requirements is to use spider-attracting markup, and repeating desired key words.

After much study on website traffic, I came across this article that motivated my writing, “Successful websites built on ‘good foundations’.”

“Good foundations underpin the potential success of any website,” said Matt. “And it is vital that every website is built so it can be as search engine friendly as possible.

“In the same way a building will fall down if it no has foundations, a website is rendered invisible on the Internet if it is not built in a way that allows it to be easily signposted online.

“If it came down to a simple choice, I’m sure every business would rather have a mediocre looking website which attracts lots of visitors, than one that is stunning but nobody can find it on the Internet.”

“For many years we, along with other SEO’s, and search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) have been trying to re-educate web designers to consider search engines and how they navigate websites.”

“Building search engine friendly or accessible websites is not complicated, in fact it’s relatively easy …”

It makes me wonder - if I had received my web development training five to ten years ago, would I be one of those web designers that don’t consider search engine importance? Would I seek training in this area? Maybe like so many designers, I just wouldn’t have the time for it.

So when seeking out a web designer, be sure you get a designer that doesn’t suggest or outsource search engine optimization - they include it.

stevestuff