Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

The best part of taking up web designing as an online business is that, if you have the necessary skills and software, you can operate exclusively from home and from your own computer which eventually means very little initial financial investment. However before you jump into a business of web designing there are certain skill sets that you should possess.

Skill Sets:

1.  

   • You must be creative and should be able to visualize requirements very easily.

   • You must be able to analyze and have a problem-solving attitude.

   • You need to have basic sense of design, proportion and color.

   • You need to have working knowledge of software like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Photoshop, and know HTML and XML coding.

You can have formal education for any of the above or can learn the software all by yourself. What matters most in this field is your portfolio and how well you have done in your previous projects. Here are some tips that you as a web developer or someone creating their own website can follow in order to ensure that the website works for the visitors.

1. Make your website intuitive, precise and user friendly. Your website should not make the user navigate across a number of buttons, tabs and pages in order to reach the desired page.

1. The layout should be simple and the colors you use should map with the theme and the concept of the website. Do not use outrageous color and motifs for that may fend off visitors. Also remember brighter and stronger color and patterns may lead to a greater download time for the website.

1. Keep an area for advertisement and search functions preferably something in the left or the right margin. Do not let advertisements come in the way of the displayed content. This may make the user disinterested in your website.

1. Present the content up, front and center. No body has a lot of time to spend and if you give them what they want, they will be further interested in exploring the web site.

1. If your website takes a lot of time to download, then even if you have great information or a product to market, you will loose your audience very soon. So always make your images and/or Flash files comprehensive and customized for the web. Do not use heavy files or folders as those will slow down the performance of your website.

These are some easy to follow tips to keep you started on web designing as an online business. Do begin with; design your own website such that it best represents your skills to the prospective clients.