Article written by Leon Cortez, High Powered Graphics

Ask most  web design companies about SEO and more than likely they will try and blind you with science and confuse you into thinking SEO is a mysterious black art. Just saying “what is SEO” to many companies will trigger an algorithmic cocktail of terms and two hours later you’ll be none the wiser. Not so here at High Powered Graphics. I love seeing the light bulb go on in our customers when I explain SEO in simple terms. I prefer our clients to not only know what we are doing for them, but why!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on organic (“natural” or un-paid) search engine result pages (SERPs) such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Notice the word “Un-paid” If your website is constructed professionally with all the essential elements a search engine requires you will rank well without additional costs. I have learned over the years what search engines like and don’t like and I gladly tell these to my web design customers.

The only websites that have to pay a so called SEO company for help are websites that are missing the main key elements that search engines require. Remember search engines can not see your websites pretty colors, enjoy your photos or hear your cool music. They live in a different reality. They only see one thing – code! It upsets me when someone calls in that has worked on building a website themselves over long period of time and I have to tell them that it looks wonderful to us humans but to the search engines it appears to be a blank page. Hence, they ignore your site. Next come the question, “what can I do” ? Well at this point you have two options.

1. I can rebuild you website correctly with all the necessary search engine elements and coding all the while wishing you had called me before you began this time wasting process.

2. Call the so called SEO companies who will more than likely set you up for a PAID google adwords account that can cost your business a fortune in monthly fees. This will drive pay per click traffic to your site but will not actually fix your sites SEO problems.

I find that people who sign up for these free template building websites are the ones who suffer this the most. The ads look great for free website places like  and  but remember the phrase ‘You get what you pay for” before wasting your valuable time with these companies.

So basically what I am trying to say is. HIRE A PROVEN WEB DESIGNER! Just like everyone with a camera is now a photographer, everyone who can insert text here or insert photo here on a website builder program thinks they are a web designer. How can you tell a professional designer with knowledge of the SEO (black arts) from the others? That’s easy, Google their work!

Ask to see a website they designed and google the products and services, not the company name or the domain name. Why? Mainly because company names as well as domains are exclusive and pop up by default. This is an old amateur web designer trick. Pretend you are a customer that has never heard of the company before.