Have a look at the chart that displays the average source of website traffic for most sites. The vast majority of visitors to any website are arriving as a result of search behaviour – meaning that they first visited a search engine (like Google or Bing) and entered a ‘search term’ that described what they were looking for (e.g. noodle restaurant). Amongst the myriad of results the search engine produced was one that mentioned your website, and they followed that link. The other two main types of traffic are referring sites (other websites that have made a link to yours) and direct traffic (people typing the URL of your site (e.g. http://www.ipodigital.co.nz) directly into their browsers’ address bar.
Search engines run little programs (called ‘spiders’) that ‘read’ every webpage they can find and then send a copy of the text back to headquarters where it is sorted and added to huge databases (called ‘indexing’). The amount of times a spider will visit is dependent on how often you update information on your site and how popular it is – but usually you can expect a visit every few weeks.
As you can see from the graph, it is IMPERATIVE that your web designer does everything that they can to ensure that your website information is accessible to search engines because the vast majority of your traffic depends upon it. Well, believe it or not – MOST WEB AGENCIES DONT! They will include ‘basic’ tags that allow your pages to be found, but most of them leave a thorough optimisation till a requested future date. They will argue that design and optimisation are two separate processes and skills – which is true – but one is pointless without the other in my opinion.
At IPO Digital Design you can be assured that every effort is taken to optimise site content right from the first design so that your site gets indexed correctly straight from the first search visit. Ongoing SEO (discussed in the ‘background’ tab above) can be arranged, and I am also happy to carry out an ‘Optimisation Analysis’ of existing websites.
