Posted by Patrick Hare
One of the most important considerations in DIY website design involves getting website design templates that are search engine friendly. This is essential because many do-it-yourself website design suites are based on content management system (CMS) platforms that may not allow you to control page titles, meta descriptions, and other factors that are going to determine how well your site ranks in the search engines.
If you’re looking to buy a DIY template, or download a website from a template, you have a lot of choices available. Some of these with be SEO friendly because you have total control over the code, and if you are an intermediate HTML designer then you can just go into the site’s source code and drop in the relevant title, meta description, keyword, and content information. (By the way, the general consensus in the search engine crowd is that the keyword tag can be left blank, but we prefer to use it so we can track the page’s focus.)
If you’re building your website on a CMS, you may need to do some digging to find out if the site is SEO friendly. Normally, a DIY site design suite is using a CMS if you can utilize “drag and drop” web design elements. A few platforms which let you create your own website will only allow you to create a “default” title tag that is going to show up the same on all of your interior pages. This does not help your site because the search engine can’t figure out which pages are the most relevant to the topic. Some other CMS systems will stick your domain name into the beginning of the title, and this also reduces your search engine effectiveness.
You don’t have to be a custom website design expert to enjoy the benefits of good search engine optimization, but it helps to understand whether the platform is SEO friendly before you buy it. In some cases, you may not have control over your domain name if you choose to leave a DIY web design and hosting company and go somewhere else, which means that you are starting at square one when it comes to optimization. For website design templates that include shopping carts, it is doubly important to have built-in SEO friendly features that are going to present your products in the best possible way to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or they aren’t going to be visible among the top results. Over the past couple of years, more and more templates and website builders have added complex SEO features into their standard offerings. If you plan to make a website using one of these tools, then adding SEO functionality to the list of requirements will help you get a head start on search engine rankings.