In This Chapter

• Search engine-friendly page design
• The importance of page titles
• Improving your keyword density
• Naming links and pages effectively
• The pitfalls of link exchanges

When you need your car repaired, you don't pull out a spanner and overalls, and when your sink is backing up, your tool of choice is probably the telephone. In the same way, savvy businesspeople know that staying focused on their business is what produces success in the long term. When it comes time to building a website, it's time to hire someone who knows what they're doing.

The task of choosing a good website designer isn't easy because of the wide range of expertise. I'll highlight the most important criteria: experience, professionalism, and the ability to work as part of a team. Too many service professionals believe that they know what you need and that your ideas are mildly interesting when the project starts, but quickly become annoying once the actual work begins. They're not going to produce a website that you'll be happy with for the long term, and if that's the kind of person you've been working with, it's time to find someone new.

A lot of web developers also now claim that they know how to do search engine optimization (SEO) and that part of what you'll receive when they're done is a very SEO-friendly website. Having looked inside quite a few business sites, including those by companies advertising that they know how to optimize for search engine placement, I have to say that most of these people are clueless about how a sophisticated search engine like Google really works and how to develop pages that offer the best findability.

Note: Home pages are irrelevant. As business guru Tom Peters would say, “deal with it!”

Just a few days ago, a colleague of mine who builds beautiful websites was quite surprised when I opined that the home pages don't matter any more and that good design is now all about individual content pages. She'd never thought about this implication from the new web reality that more people see a secondary page then ever visit the home page.