Today more than ever, your website needs to be designed better than ever. Pretty? Should your website be pretty at the expense of being useful? Think about it. Of course you want your site to look nice; have a solid look and feel about it, but you need to understand that the most important thing about websites is that they convey information, and linking structures that allow a user to quickly find what it is they are looking for; make a decision; and respond to a call to action.
It cost’s money to run a website, design a website, and maintain a website. If your website is beautiful, but people have to hack around on it to find what they are looking for, remember; if they found your site by using Google or Bing, perhaps Yahoo or some other search engine, they were pointed there by a link. The link purportedly is pointing to the most relevant answer to a question your visitor had, and entered into a search engine. A “keyword” or combination of “keywords” was entered into a search engine which reported back by presenting you with a whole bunch of links to sites that were relevant to your search.
How was the list of sites that say Google sent you in response to your search, “relevant,” to your search?
How did they choose those particular website links to send you. Are the designers just lucky? Does Google and Bing just pick a bunch of websites at random that match a keyword and present them back to you?
Well, the answer is no.
The major search engines have employed thousands of programmers who are sitting in computer filled rooms for years now designing, coding, creating algorithms that are constantly “reading” and processing unheard of amounts of data which are gathered by their “bots” or computer programs that scour the internet gobbling up information from every corner of the internet that they can scan.
The genius of the internet is that a series of IP addresses, or numbers such as 144.125.35.187 (picked at random), are associated with a computer or series of computers. Lets say for simplicity’s sake that each computer in the universe is assigned an IP address. There needs to be a central registry of all those numbers so the Internic was formed. The top registry of registrars, or computers that keep track of domain names and IP associations. These large computer systems store all the IP addresses in a table.
People don’t remember blocks of numbers so well, so they decided to create the domain name system so it was easier to remember someones website name. Each IP address was associated with a name that people could remember. The domain name associated with this website it http://tophoustonseo.com. Through a conversion table that converts the name tophoustonseo.com to IP 162.144.119.147 which is associated with the domain tophoustonseo.com, a browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer uses http protocol or hyper text transfer protocol, to send an inquiry to the closest “name server” on the internet.
If you were looking for this website you would type into the search box in your browser a domain name. In the olden days you had to type in http://www.tophoustonseo.com and hit return on your keyboard. The computer used HTTP protocol to transmit over your internet connection, the domain name you were searching for, in this case tophoustonseo.com. By sending it to the name server it is asking what IP address is associated with this domain name. If the local name server at your local ISP (internet service provider) does not know the ip address, it simply asks another name server a little higher up the chain if it knows the IP address, if it does not know it eventually gets to the TOP level registrar at the internic. If a domain has been purchased and registered and paid for, it knows the IP address. It passes the domain name and associated IP address back down the chain to your local name server and each one updates their tables so that it now knows what the ip associated with the domain is until such time is it changes for some reason. The top level also broadcasts this table each day several times a day to update all the zone name servers across the world. So now, the name server knows where the computer you are looking for is, the HTTP message usually asks for a specific page on your server which is fetched up and sent back you your system where your browser reads the HTML code sent back and presents it in all its glory to you.
The default page associated with a domain is usually index.htm or index.html or default.htm, default.html. There are other variations, but the point is, is that there is a default page that is served up if you type in the domain name of a website. This default page needs to have some very specific information on it in order for Google to read it and then determine if it is “good” enough to be indexed in their computer system and where it should be in terms of relevance. In other words does it come up on page 1 of google or page 1,000,000. I think you can imagine the implications of these results.
If you are on page one and there are 10,000 people searching for your keyword term and you sell products on your website, then search results are directly related to money in your pocket if you page is well designed and written to convert visitors into buyers.
Let us design your website so that it is properly configured to provide a high probability of gaining high rankings.
There are other key factors in determining ranking your website on page one including proper search engine optimization, but initial design is a primary foundation to good rankings.
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