Sunday, February 26, 2012

Integrating SEO into your Website Design Guide

By Max Ammo


Many website owners and web designers disregard the importance of integrating SEO to their website design. A site that is not friendly to search engines tends to lose a lot of possible traffic. Since the only three common ways to get to your website are typing directly the address into your browser, clicking on a link posted on another website or referrals from search engines. Take note that approximately 50% of the visitors of popular sites comes from search engine results.

When looking to make your website search engine friendly is to look through your website and find the typical issues that stop search engine bots from ranking sites well the main flaw being flash content. Including flash in your website may sometimes improve the look of your site but may be the reason no one will be able to find it.

Search engine robots work by reading text from a website and so if important links or content is included on the flash content the robots won't be able to read it and therefore will be unable to index it. An example of this is a navigation menu created in flash. It will mean that other pages get hit with robots. The search engine robots are a major consideration when trying to integrate SEO in your web design.

Ajax is another thing to try to avoid using when integrating SEO web design, for the same reason as flash should be reconsidered. Ajax can disable particular spiders from being able to index certain content on your site. The cons to using this far outweigh the fact that it may be convenient to some users. It will result in fewer pages being shown in search results.

Properly using HTML tags will help the crawler store relevant information for your website more. Like using the alt attribute of the image tag, since the crawler cannot read pictures, it will be best for them to read the alt attribute instead. This is a common slip up that most designers do not pay too much attention to their SEO web design.

Another important thing is Title Tags. Including one of your keywords in the title makes your article more compatible and more relevant for search engines. However, this doesn't mean you should pack it full, doing this will only work against you as search engines may view this as spam and your SEO solution will be in vain. You may also wish to consider including keywords in the article header.

A smarter way of getting your page relevancy better, you must use words related to your key word. Like for an example, adding the word painting to the keyword art will surely regarded more relevant than just putting art alone. This is an effective strategic SEO technique to make search engines think that your page is rich in content.

A good looking site is not the be all and end all of web design and much more importantly is getting traffic to your site. If you utilize the tips given then your site will have to have a lot of changes made to the coding and design which can be fiddly, and these results will not happen overnight, SEO web design really is a skill that is easy to acquire but requires patience and concentration, but will bring about great results leading to your site being found and ranked well by search engines. V:8




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