The 10 Commandments of Search Engine Friendly Web Design
What is ‘Search Engine Friendly’ web design?
It means that special care is taken to ensure your website can be easily scanned and indexed by search engines. A search engine friendly websites allows search engines to easily jump from page to page of your website, read your website content, determine what keywords are relevant to your website, and then deliver search results accordingly. This is absolutely critical if ranking well in the search engines is important to you. It doesn’t mean that your website WILL rank well (there are many other factors that will influence this) – but it’s a great start: it means that your website CAN rank well and that there are no hurdles preventing it from doing so.
The 10 commandments of Search Engine Friendly Web Design
- Title tags should be UNIQUE Your website title tags should uniquely identify the content on any given page – title tags provide the first clue as to what a given page is about. If you have an ecommerce website, then every single product page should have a unique title tag – ask your web developer to make sure this is generated automatically for you, it can make a big difference to ranking well for individual product names.
- Make sure your website is easy to navigate Your menu should be obvious (at the top of the page) and straight forward. Avoid flash and javascript, desired mouse over effects should be able to be achieved using css. If you have a lot of deep level pages, then make sure you setup a sitemap and link to it from your home page so that it can be easily found.
- Content should be well structured and keyword rich Just like users, Search engines like useful heading tags, bullet points, highlighted words and keyword rich content.
- Be aware of keyword ‘cannibalization’ This is when you target the same keywords across many different pages. In doing so, you water down the value of the keywords on any particular page and search engines can have trouble determining which page to display to searchers.
- Update Regularly A cms (content management system) or blog will enable you to keep your website up-to-date with fresh content. The more relevant the content you add, the more likely you will build natural links from other websites – link building is one of the most important elements of seo. By adding new content regularly, you also boost your keyword combinations and increase the chances of visitors finding you via long tail searches (search phrases that are typically longer and more specific than normal).
- Clean layouts work best The cleaner the coding of your website, the easier it is for search engines to access your website content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for design implementation and all scripts should be contained in external files.
- Avoid the excessive use of FLASH. There are many obstacles to achieving search engine friendliness in Flash websites, so use it sparingly. Flash can be great for creating some eye-catching ads or dynamic flair to your website but should not be heavily used.
- Avoid embedding text in images Search engines can’t read text that appears in an image – so you’re better off displaying your content in real text wherever possible. When it is necessary to embed text in images then ALT tags can be used to describe the content.
- Meaningful directory and file names Something like: “http://www.clothes.com/jeans/levis/” is a lot more meaningful to search engines than “http://www.clothes.com/index.php?cat=10&id=12″. Your keywords should be included in directory and file names – this is another thing you can ask you web developer to generate automatically for you, it’s well worth the effort!
- Link to your domain, not index.php Every-time you display a link to your home page, you should link to your full domain, not the file name. The number of pages linking to your home page (both external and internal) is an important element of seo, you don’t want to divide the total number of incoming links to your home page between 2 different links!
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Author: Talita Kindermann
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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