As a member of an Indianapolis web design team, I am constantly looking for new tools, resources and ideas. I want the web sites we design for our small business clients to look cool, but most importantly I want them to perform well on the major search engines.
Sometimes, as I chase the coolest new plug in, tool or widget, I forget the basics. It is at those moments it is good to read a post like the one I found on Web Design Depot recently. In it the author argues:
If you want to have a site which performs well in search engines then you need to stop worrying about search engines and start worrying about creating a really great website. Code your site properly, make it accessible, make it usable, make sure it has fantastic content, make sure you have great marketing that has other people talking about it.
And I think he is absolutely correct. If you pay attention to the basics, the site will take care of itself. That is why we enjoy using wordpress. Much of the coding, and data organization is handled by the platform, so we can focus on developing great content and social media strategies to drive traffic to the websites we build. We use tools like Website Grader to be sure we are doing everything we can to make the site attractive, and Linkdex to check and see if we are competitive in a specific space, but ultimately it comes down to content.
So the question is, what are you doing to develop great content for your website, giving visitors a reason to come back again and again.