In the past, the role of the web designer was rather straightforward and simple — their job was to create a website for you that was visually appealing, and functioned in the way that you wanted it to. However, just as the internet has aged, or “added on years”, the years have added new requirements for the aesthetic designers of days past. Overlooking all of the visual changes of recent years — from the basic text websites of the 1990s to the flash-and-flaunt designs of the late 90s and early 2000s — there are new requirements that are demanded of today’s website designers. Today’s web designers not only must possess the ability to deliver a high-functioning website, they must have a solid understanding of SEO, or search engine optimization, so that their end-result designs — your website — is prepped and primed to compete in today’s competitive search engine marketplace.

Today’s website technologies are significantly more advanced than those that were available even just five years ago. Dynamic functionality is the norm, rather than a luxury reserved for those who can afford the oft-called ‘geeky play toys’ and the servers needed to run them, and online competition increases exponentially by the day for many competitive markets. When you hire a website designer today, your website’s search engine placement and positioning should not be an afterthought, rather, it should be planned beforehand and be integrated into the very core of your website’s design and structuring.

Now, this does not mean that a website design company needs to also provide SEO services, or search engine placement services, themselves to be considered a good website design company. Rather, what is important is that your website designer of choice understands the basics of search engine optimization and designs your website that allows for easy optimization of all of its important elements. What would be tragic, especially in this day in age, is to purchase professional website design services only to realize later that there is no easy way for you to create unique page titles for every page, or to use user and search engine friendly page names instead of the generic, and less-than-helpful for search engine rankings improvement query strings for dynamically-generated pages.

Just because you hire a website design company, this does not mean that their only job should be to create a visually-appealing and functional website. There is too much competition online these days to leave your website’s search engine optimization as an afterthought rather than an integral part of your website’s initial design and layout. Again, we are not saying that it is your website designer’s job to create keyword-focused page titles, or to come up with your website’s meta description tags, but it should be their job to create a website that can easily be modified to import these important search engine optimization elements.

While the role that website designers play has not changed a lot over the years, creating a search-engine-friendly design is one of the more important requirements for today’s website designers. Bottom line — if your website design company of choice doesn’t have the ability to create designs that are easy to optimize for search engines, there are a thousands of other designers — both freelance and corporate — who are more than willing to take on your website design project.

CPS is a website design company offering search engine positioning services to Pinckney, Howell, Brighton, South Lyon and all of Livingston County, Michigan.