Anybody who has had his web site on page 1 on Google for a competitive keyword like web design has reasons to celebrate. The key word 'web design' is indeed one of the most competitive key words online with Google displaying nearly 1 billion web pages. According to the Yahoo keyword selector tool, the key words web design is searched an average of 300,000 times a month. We could reasonably expect about 1000,000 searches for 'web design' a month on the 3 major search engines. One would think that being on the top of the first page of results is enough to take over the web design market. But is it enough to be on the top position?

Given that nobody, at least not many people, optimise solely for the sake of being on the top page of a search engine, we need to consider the purpose of being highly ranked and how to attain the objectives linked to this purpose.

There are a number of possible gains from a highly ranked web site. The prime objective remains traffic, unique visits. The next obvious question should be, how do we capitalise on this traffic?

This is where the web design of the highly ranked web site kicks in. Being well ranked for a keyword like web design will inevitably generate traffic through your web site. This means that a relatively large number of web users, typically several hundreds if not thousands, will visit your web site daily. The web design and content of your web site will determine if these visits translate into your objectives, let's say web design orders.

If you are looking for web design leads that will convert into orders, your product offer and how well you convert the leads are key success factors that you need to address carefully so you make the most of your no.1 position. You need to do your marketing. What market segment are you targeting? Is your domain name, your product offer, the look and feel of your web design and your pricing structure geared to your target market? Sounds complicated but in practice, if you know what you are doing, you can very quickly reengineer your web design to tackle and correct these issues.

If you are lost, get some marketing specialists in. It does cost but well worth it. They will analyse your product and services offer and advice on the type of web design, graphic and text content required to attract the attention, generate the interest and call for action that you require to generate good leads.

So, if you are the fortunate few who knows something about Search Engine Optimization and have got a web site up on that top page for a good keyword, start thinking seriously about your web design. Without the right product and the correct web design strategy, you could be losing opportunities with every day that goes by.

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Ralph Ramah is the webmaster of Discount Web Design, one of the leading web design company in the UK offering quality web site design and SEO services