How
To Design A Search Engine Friendly Website
by Arif Hanid
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 optimisation
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
optimisation strategy. 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 javascripts 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
text.
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 Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com), 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.
TOP TIP: Wordtracker offer a one day subscription
to their service from which you can squeeze nearly 2 ½ days
worth of use! Here’s how – Sign-up for the service on the evening of
Day 1 (the service will be available almost immediately so you can
start searching for your competitive keywords straight away). You will
also be able to use the service for the whole of Day 2 and strangely
for the whole of Day 3! Enough time to get some good keywords for a lot
of pages!
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 typefaced 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’ve covered the use of graphics
briefly above, emphasising 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.
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 nav 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.
Following the basic suggestions above will help
lay the foundation to apply further good search engine optimisation
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.
Author Arif Hanid
Internet Marketing Manager for Ambleton Computing.
Experts in Internet Development and Internet Marketing Strategies.
arif.hanid@ambleton.co.uk www.ambleton.co.uk
*** Sponsored by Laughingdeals.com – the best
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Arif Hanid may be contacted at http://www.laughingdeals.com
or arif.hanid@ambleton.co.uk
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