what web design software is optimal for search engines?

[Paul.Donahue]

Hi,

I am going to make a website for my small business and am wondering what web design software is the best to use so that the website is easily found by search engines.

Thanks in advance.

[Albright]

It's kind of a moot question because it's not the design software which is going to affect your search engine ranking nearly as much as your content. As long as the design does not get in the way of your content, everything will be fine, but it's possible to create bad designs in any tool you choose.

At any rate, if you're picking web design software based on SEO considerations, you're worrying about the wrong thing. But pretty much 95% of SEO is worrying about the wrong thing…

[Paul.Donahue]

I'm asking this because I've learned that i-web websites do not work well with search engines and was told that the software has to be html-based. That's why I'm looking for suggestions for html based web design software for macs.

[Dzaine.in]

@Paul.Donahue

SEO and Website are 2 different things, having said that, I would like to inform you that, you need to build the site with SEO optimization in mind.

You can use any Web Site creation software out there, just remember to put in the keywords, meta-tags, titles etc. in your website for being indexed by the Search Engines - that is SEO in a nutshell.

There are plenty of software for creating websites, however, most serious websites are built on CMS (Content Management Systems) - the most popular CMS are Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc.

Cheerios,

DZaine.in

[SpyderBite]

A business degree. Software is not going to replace a knowledge of how marketing works.. Online or offline.

[Dunmail]

As others have said, you seem to be confusing two different things.

At its simplest, SEO is a matter of providing a coherent structure to the pages on your site. This is no different to having a good structure for a paper document. So typically you'd have:

Title

Heading

Sub Heading

Title would be a "h1" tag in HTML terms and you are only going to have one of these per page/document. Headings are for the major sections (h2 tags) and subheadings are for more minor points of interest (h3 tags). As an example let's say you are making the site for Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory then the main page might look something like:

<h1>Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory</h1>
some introductory content here
<h2>Our Chocolates</h2>
More content
<h3>Dark Chocolates</h3>
...
<h3White Chocolates</h3>
...

<h2Confectionary</h2>
etc

The page has a structure and each heading mentions the word "chocolate" or something to do with sweets/candies and is relevant. Incoming links take time to obtain as they are outside your control (if done "legitimately") but you can start the process by linking to other relevant sites yourself, say a Wikipedia article about cocoa, if the webmasters of those sites notice a lot of traffic from WWCF then they will often put in a return link.

Unless your site is about a very specialist subject then it may take a while to appear on the search rankings. If it appears on the first page of a search engine's results then you probably don't need to do much more than keep checking it periodically.

My own site appears fourth in one of the search terms that I've targeted. The top two hits are to the associated club website that I also manage and the third hit is the Wikipedia article on the subject - that article does link to my site but someone else added the link . Just tried two other searches on different subjects and both the associated pages appear on the first results page from Google. I've done nothing more than what I've indicated above, no link farms or dubious tactics.

HTH

[-pete-]

Originally Posted by tina1234

Agree with DZaine.in.
Hi Paul.Donahue,
if you want to create a online shop site, i think Magento system is a good choice.

Be aware that Magento is quite complex and can take some time to get used to (although Magento Go is slightly better in this regard), if you don't know code or just want to make something quickly then you may have better luck with a hosted system such as Shopify or Volusion

In terms of optimising for search engines - as others have said - making sure your content is well written, constantly updated, uses appropriate headings, page titles and descriptions (meta tags don't really matter these days since most people will overuse them google just tends to ignore them) and you should be fine

[any-key]

Paul,

I assume you dont know how to code HTML / CSS and obviousely you are not quite familiar with SEO.

A good business website is pretty important to be done right, on the technical side and also on the design / UX part. A bad business website is like making a bad commercial, customers who dont know you / your business simply won't consider making business with you if your website is a bad experience.

Having said this, its not the tool that makes the difference. There are a few good books you should read before you start a DIY website, especially if its for your business. Also a website is not a "one off" activity you would need to have something inplace to maintain it and update content frequently (very important for any search engine).

If you dont want to deal with all that consider spending some money and leave this to a good webdesign studio. If they are good they will offer a solution that fits your budget and still is by far better than anything you can come up with (again considering you have no experience with coding for web, SEO, UX and so on).