There are many websites that fail to target their required traffic, even if they’ve had some search engine optimisation work done. One of
main causes for this is simply because website isn’t search engine friendly. This is a basic essential that needs to be incorporated into design of all websites at outset – think of it as foundation to establishing your search engine optimisation strategy. This article aims to highlight 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 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 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 lines of code up with spaces, but to ensure that elements search engine is interested in, i.e. Title tag, Description tag, Keyword tag (these days only some search engines really use keyword tag), Alt tag, are readable near beginning of code. Search Engines don’t like wadding through lines and lines of javascript to get to 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 bulk of javascript from a different file. ·Think twice on how to use graphics – make them relevant to your content and use Alt tag for all images. ·Position main content of page before images, or at least with images nested between text.
2.Keywords Having good keywords is one of most important areas to consider when designing a website/webpage. One of best tools for this is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com), which allows you to identify good competitive keywords for your pages. In general 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 top 10-15 keywords. You can always export results to Excel and try out other competitive keywords if 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 service on 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 service for whole of Day 2 and strangely for whole of Day 3! Enough time to get some good keywords for a lot of pages!
