TWO COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SEO

1. SEO AND WEBSITE DESIGN - WHICH IS THE CHICKEN? WHICH THE EGG?

We say elsewhere on this site that it may be possible for our experts to optimise your existing website and so boost your traffic. But would you have a house built before you had the plans? We ask because in fact search engine optimisation provides the blueprint for website design: it is the starting-point, not an afterthought.

Clearly, this order of events makes websites more expensive, but less so than when problems have to be solved retrospectively. And it is based on a fundamental business principle - know your competitors!

At the outset the search engine optimisers look at your competitors' websites, their strategies and optimisation, and a whole host of other minutiae. This information then goes to a sequence analyst, whose findings are passed back to the optimiser. At this point the framework is written.

Only then does the designer become involved.

So it is because Divadani Design works with some of the best optimisers in Europe that we are among the top design teams on the Internet - and that we never compete on price. Our aim is to maximise a client's business through search engine traffic and Internet marketing & advertising, not just to win yet another contract to build a site.

Simply owning a website is no more a successful business step than registering a company. It merely exposes you to millions of competitors. You need to achieve Google top ten ranking for all relevant search terms, so you need the best website designers, which means by definition using the best search engine optimisers.

2. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION AND WEB MARKETING

SEO and web marketing are often taken to be the same. Wrong. SEO is only part of a web marketing strategy and can be used alone or with other techniques to drive traffic to your website.

As Europe's largest internetwork, our partner business Where On Earth Group gives us the resources to deal with your SEO issues and your marketing & advertising issues. The outcome will be a strategy across a wide range of search phrases to capture different categories of potential clients. Naturally we will target people actively looking for your product. We will moreover aim to capture those who, without thinking about your product, might choose to buy on impulse - and we won't forget about passing trade who don't even know your product exists!

We urge you not to succumb to the delusion that results are achieved purely and simply by the appearance of your website.

Although Divadani Design websites always have striking visual elegance, this is not the only factor that translates into sales. The question you should be asking yourself is 'Will my site get any traffic?' It is a question that you might also put to your website designer, who will quite likely not want to answer it. Most designers in fact have precious few visitors to their own sites, because they seldom have top ten ranking.

You wouldn't buy a car without looking under the bonnet or giving it a test drive, nor for just a few hundred pounds would you expect to be buying a Ferrari. Why then should a smart, flashy but cheap website give you any va-va-vroom? What you want is traffic - and quality traffic at that!