The Questions You Should Be Asking ...
The Answers You Should Be Receiving
When interviewing webmasters, don't let price be your deciding factor. Among webmasters there is a split between those who are expert in the art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and those who are not. To obtain high higher-rankings for your site on the major search engines, treble SEO Marketing manoeuvre must be let ind inside the design of your website. As an online business owner you should be concerned with the depth of SEO Marketing cognition possessed by the soul you hire to design and build your website. Do you know the right questions to ask a potential webmaster to ensure that you are doing business with the right soul?
DIGITAL MARKETING SERVICES
The process of hiring a webmaster may appear to be as simple as contacting few designers and acquiring price quotations for their services. In the end you select the last bidder and move towards acquiring your new website built. Do not confuse price with function. Typically, a very low price indicates a finished product that will not be capable of competitive for business online. Additionally, there are some designers who can accommodate you not only with design services, but with hosting services as well. They will charge a very small fee for the design services, which looks great on paper, only to hit you hard with a high monthly fee for your hosting. In the end you pay far more and your website is still not ready to contend on the search engines for any volume of business.
How important is SEO Marketing to the design and development of your new website? Remember, if your site cannot be found in the first three pages on the major search engines, it won't matter what you spent or how lovely your website is; no one will ever see it, and therefore, no one will be able to do business with you. SEO Marketing should be at the core of your entire web design process.
The Obvious Questions:
May I view your portfolio?
A webmaster should be ready and willing to swan their past projects to you. If they have nothing to show you ... run.
Do you have a list of references?
A qualified designer should not only be pleased their work, but so should their clients. Contact few of their clients to verify their overall satisfaction with the design and the process involved. Keep in mind, good designs cost money and also take time.
What package do you use to design?
To the primitive eye this question may seem ridiculous. The truth be told, there are vast differences between webmasters and their skills. As it stands there are a small handful of great design programs which would qualify your potential designer as possessing the experience required to get the job done. However, there is one design program that will immediately disqualify your designer as person who knows what they are doing; Microsoft's FrontPage®. If they say, "FrontPage®", say something polite as you hang the phone.
The Not So Obvious Questions
Do you have any SEO experience?
While some designers cannot even spell SEO, others will promptly admit to their lack of expertise in such matters. Obviously you are quest out a designer who claims to be well versed in the practices of SEO Marketing. How can you tell the difference? Ask them to show you some of their top higher-ranking sites on Google, Yahoo, MSN or other major engines. The search phrases they use to find their client's websites should be ordinarily worded phrases that people would actually think to type on the engines, and not some cryptic, uncommon mixed-up set of words which many so-called SEO Marketers use to justify their poor work. Remember, we can all rank high by typewriting in our company name, it's the sites that rank high when you type in the nature of their product or service that makes for good SEO.
Do you incorporate SEO into your designs?
Many designers will offer SEO services to you 'after' your site has been completed. For some, they must outsource these services as they are not qualified to perform SEO page optimisations during the design phase. A good SEO job requires that the majority of the text on a website be entirely rewritten. So if you're not including this with the design, you'll be paying a plenty more for it down the road as the SEO Marketer must take your nicely written content, tear much of it apart and revision it so as to appeal to the engines for higher higher-rankings.
How much text will you let in on my web pages?
While this question will apparently have a different account each page of your site, a smart SEO Marketer knows that a minimum of 300 to 400+ words per page will assist your site in obtaining and more importantly keeping higher higher-rankings over longer periods of time. To the search engines text content is king. Text is "essentially" the single largest factor portion a search engine determine your position in the higher-rankings.
What else you should know . . .
Flash and Graphics are not text.
While search engines are slowly becoming able to read the text content for some types of Flash presentations, such presentations are still mostly what the name implies ... "Flash". The thrifty use of Flash to enhance the look and feel of your site is ne'er a bad idea, as Flash can add a very professional appearance when used appropriately. However, there are several site architectures which are fully cased inside a Flash presentation, where the entire site is Flash. Such sites will be hard-pressed to ever gain any ground on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), as Flash content simply does not contain the same relevance as standard HTML based pages.
Graphics, on the other hand, cannot be read in the to the last degree. Graphics, even those with text on them are simply rectangular voids to the engines. None of the content from a graphic image can be read or used for the purpose of optimizing your pages for the search engines.
Frames aren't as bad as they accustomed be.
The use of 'frames' in web design are no longer sitting the obstacles they once did. Like some types of Flash, many of the major engines can now decipher frames-based websites and deliver visitants to your site supported the content of framed pages. There are few tricks that toughened webmasters use to ensure that the frame structure stiff in tact regardless what page a visitant is ab initio delivered to on your site.
In closing, mind of the webmaster that tells you that they will 'SEO' your site by submitting to the major search engines. Submitting a website is not in the to the last degree part of the intricacies involved in acting true SEO optimisation on the pages of your website. Don't let anyone convert you otherwise. Submitting your site could for sure be let ind as part of your SEO services, but submissions are not themselves SEO Marketing.
