This is the final part of a three part series on optimizing your website to generate more traffic and convert them to more sales than you are doing now.  While Parts I and II dealt with professional copywriting and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and their contributions to increasing traffic and sales, this part addresses what you will look at after your content is secured, specifically, custom website development and design that you can afford, designed for maximum SEO and ROI (Return on Investment).

The Importance of SEO Web Development and Design

Think of your website as your virtual storefront. You can have the best products or services in your field. But your store doesn’t have any signage on it and doesn’t face the street. Furthermore, all your stock is packed up in the back room and the guy you have working the counter doesn’t know anything except how to process the orders. You’re going to have trouble selling your great products and services. Even if you have great advertising and signage pointing to your location, once people get there and see a drab storefront and empty show room, they’re going to be very reluctant to part with their hard-earned money.
In case the analogy isn’t clear, your products/services are the great products and services that you are trying to sell on your website. If you can make multiple sales through your website without spending an outrageous amount on development, you’re going to get high ROI. You’ve made sure that all your pages are keyword optimized with the phrases that people use to find the products and services you sell, that’s the great advertising and signage pointing to your location. But you’re not converting to sales. Why? Your SEO did not extend to your storefront. That’s the website design. If your website doesn’t draw your traffic in, they’re not going to stick around long enough to buy anything, even if you got them there using good SEO practices.

Custom Development and Web Design Fundamentals

So what are the elements that make for quality SEO/high ROI web development and design? There are a few factors that can make a real difference in how well your site converts visitors into sales.

Optimized Site Architecture (Link Organization)

It’s important that you create good inter-page relationships and that there is good internal and external linking. When a search engine sees multiple useful pages that link to each other (useful pages are identified by the search engine spiders as pages that are linked to directly by other useful sites), that site gets more weight. You certainly don’t want pages that link to nowhere or many pages that are nearly impossible to navigate to from your site.

Attractive Design

Although maybe it shouldn’t matter, it does. People DO judge a book by its cover. If a search engine directs someone to a site that has drab colors and all text, or the opposite, that has bright, multi-colored, flashing text and images everywhere so that the senses are overloaded, that site will have an extremely high bounce rate, and you’ll get no conversions. You need to have someone with a good sense of aesthetics design your site, or at least, someone like this to help you refine the site after it is designed.

Readability

It’s the content writer’s job to provide readable content, but the way the content is presented on the page can have a lot to do with how readable the content is as well. A good web design will have content in short bursts surrounded by lots of white space. Crowded, long blocks of text after long blocks of text will not keep your traffic around.

How to Make Sure Your Website is Focused on SEO and ROI

Of course, the crux of this article is how affordable custom development and web design fits in with SEO and helps you with ROI, so let’s close by touching on those points.

SEO: Keywords, Meta, Links

A good custom web design makes it easy for the site owner to input keywords, title tags and meta, and these are the elements that are going to get those search engine spiders jumping. In addition a good SEO-friendly design will make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your site through an RSS Feed, record their interest on directories like Digg and Technorati, and connect to your site through Facebook and Twitter. And of course, all this can lead to multiple inbound links, which are SEO gold.

ROI: Securing Conversions, Calls to Action, Efficiency

One way to help boost your ROI is to create a website that’s affordable. It’s not hard to have an SEO website created at a reasonable price, if you know where to look, and once it’s up, it can pay great dividends with minimal upkeep expenses. Of course, you can’t sacrifice quality for a bargain. A good web design company will create a website that is not only within your budget, but is attractive, with many elements drawing in traffic and sending them to your calls to action, and with calls to action that are effective in securing conversions. This is the formula for Internet marketing success.