This week we have just taken a lawyer website we developed from start to finished live. The interesting thing about this website is that our client was particularly concerned with the search engine friendliness of his website, so we made several design decisions based on this fact.
For starters, we made the main navigation, the page headings, and pretty much whatever text we needed to add, “real text”. There are only a handful of fonts that can be used for website text which is why most of the time any special fonts on websites you see are created with images embedded into the page and not actual text. This can make for a lovely looking website and in some cases this is a perfectly acceptable way to build and design a website. In our client’s case though, we were more concerned with the search engine visibility of the site’s keywords which is why we gave google as much text to read as possible.
Additionally, we optimized our client’s page titles which is something we do for all of our clients. These aren’t the titles you see written directly on the website page, but rather the title of the page that your website browser sees. The line of text that is written in the tabs of your browser window is something that is customizable through the website code and is one of the things that google looks for most when scanning a website for keywords. In this case, we set the homepage title tag to “Joel G. Deutch | Cincinnati Family Law, Criminal Defense, and Personal Injury Lawyer”. This title states the location of our client and the most likely terms a person would search for when looking for his services.
Finally, we linked up certain portions of descriptive text throughout the website. The “Featured Services” box on the right side of this website has a list of services our client performs. This list of keywords is linked up to other pages on the website so that google and other search engines think, “oh, this page must be about criminal law because that’s what the link said that pointed me there”. This is another easy and simple way to make a website search engine friendly.
A lot of times our clients are not willing to sacrifice good design for search engine friendliness, which we can completely understand. However, looking at this website it is pretty clear that good design does not necessarily have to suffer in order to achieve a search engine friendly website. Our client wanted a clean and simple design, and wanted it search engine friendly. Now that we have laid the groundwork, our client can now hire a search engine marketing company to take our work a step further to really get his website out there without having to start over, or work with a website that has limited potential for search engine success.
Have a look around our client’s new website at www.joeldeutchlaw.com.