How to Design a Search Engine Friendly Website
There are many websites that fail to target their required
traffic, even if they've had some search engine optimization
work done. One of the main causes for this is simply because the
website isn't search engine friendly.
This is a basic essential that needs to be incorporated into the
design of all websites at the outset - think of it as the
foundation to establishing your search engine optimization
strategy. We follow the guidelines mentioned below for all our
websites which are now highly ranked on Google and other search
engines. For ex:
The ISP Guide: http://www.theispguide.com The Hosting Guide:
http://www.thehostingguide.com VIPWH Web Hosting:
http://www.vipwh.com
This article aims to highlight the areas a web designer should
think about and incorporate into their design for search engine
effectiveness:
1. Search Engine Friendly Pages
It is important that when you design your website you not only
bear in mind what your website requirements are, but also what
the requirements are for search engines. Best way to approach
this is to remember that search engines don't really care about
how nice or complicated your graphics or flash movies are, or
how snazzy your JavaScript is. Instead search engines look at
the code behind your page. Therefore if you want to impress a
search engine, then your code needs to be nice and easy to read.
Now from this I don't mean adding 'comment' tags and breaking
the lines of code up with spaces, but to ensure that the
elements the search engine is interested in, i.e. Title tag,
Description tag, Keyword tag (these days only some search
engines really use the keyword tag), Alt tag, are readable near
the beginning of the code. Search Engines don't like wadding
through lines and lines of JavaScript to get to the core areas
that can help you page's ranking. Therefore careful planning and
positioning of your page elements is required.
TIPS:
If you're using table for laying out your page then make
them simple and not too complex. Avoid using frames.
If you need JavaScript for navigation purposes, then use
smaller scripts to call up the bulk of the JavaScript from a
different file. Think twice on how to use graphics -
make them relevant to your content and use the Alt tag for all
images. Position the main content of the page before the
images, or at least with the images nested between the texts.
2. Keywords
Having good keywords is one of the most important areas to
consider when designing a website/webpage.
One of the best tools for this is SEO Tools -
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools, which allows you to identify
good competitive keywords for your pages.
In general the range of keywords associated to your pages can be
very extensive therefore for good concentration and prominence
of keywords it is advisable to carefully select the top 10-15
keywords. You can always export the results to Excel and try out
other competitive keywords if the ones you selected initially do
not produce any noticeable benefits.
3. Content
Many search engines look at the main body of the page and
identify keywords and phrases that are used within the text.
TIP:
Use competitive keywords relevant to the purpose of the page
within the main body of the page.
Always try and ensure that the keywords are prominent within the
text body, i.e. they appear near the beginning of the page, they
are defined using the 'heading' tag, they are typeface in bold,
or they are used as hyperlinks.
4. Page Title
This is arguably one of the most important areas of a page and
needs special attention to ensure that a good title is selected.
Similar to many other areas of designing a search engine
friendly page, the Page Title should also have a good keyword
which describes the page content.
To keep within the limits of many search engines the number of
words for the Title shouldn't exceed nine.
5. Page Description
Another important area to work on for good ranking is the Page
Description.
This is the text found under the META Description tag and is
displayed to users in the search results. Again, it is a good
idea to pay attention to the use of good keywords when writing
the description, which should be short (not more than 20-25
words) and sells your page before the user, has even opened it!
6. Graphics
We have covered the use of graphics briefly above, emphasizing
the importance of using an Alt tag containing the relevant
keyword(s).
Although the use of images can be nice and very appealing to a
website, it is also important to bear in mind that they
shouldn't overpower the textual content of your page. As a
general rule of thumb it is best to stick to a 70/30 ratio (70
text/30 images).
7. Site Map
A Site Map is a fantastic way for search engines to find all
your juicy pages on your website. There are many free Site Map
tools available on the web that'll create your site map
instantly. Google recently come up with collaborative crawling
system called Google Sitemaps (BETA) -
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html ,
that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us
informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to
these pages.
8. Navigation Links
Navigation links to other pages on your website should be nice
and easy. There are some engines which find it difficult to
navigate through to the other pages on your website if the
navigation bar is too complicated, e.g. complicated pop-ups, use
of flash, etc. Therefore if your site does have complicated
navigation then it's always a good idea to implement simple text
based hyperlinks to your common pages at the bottom of every
page on your website.
Follow the basic suggestions mentioned above will help lay the
foundation to apply further good search engine optimization
advice which will make the difference in your overall search
engine ranking.
This finer area of SEO is beyond the realm of this document and
will require further investment based on individual needs.