SEO Friendly Website Design

Designing is the base of search engine optimization and it plays a very big role in seo work for any site. The following steps must be considered during the design process for optimal search engine friendliness.

Here are some tips for designing an SEO friendly site:

1: Site must be user friendly and easy to navigate the inner pages and links.

2: Keep your navigation on the left side of your web pages. Our SEO experts at Vision Media explain, “Site navigation should be at the left side of the web page, so that search engine robots can easily crawl all site inner page links

3: Avoid using JavaScript, flash and frames on your web pages and navigation links. Generally search engine robots does not crawl JavaScript, flash and frames.

4: If you are using images in your site header, then try to split your image into several sections. It will help you put more keywords in alt tags here. It will also help you to save site load time.

5: Header tags are very important for SEO work, so always use header tags on your web pages. It will be great if you use the h1 tag as your web page heading and it should be kept relatively short. However, never use the h1 tag twice on one page.

Note: H1 tags should be kept in bold format and should include extra space below the heading text. This may be done in the CSS style sheet file of your website.

6: As you may have heard, “content is king” on the web, especially when it comes to seo, so the more the better. However, make sure you put the main keywords at the beginning of the page contents on all your information pages.

7: A VERY important point not considered by most web designers, is to avoid unnecessary coding in the webpage source code like and .

In our work, we have found an unusually high amount of unnecessary code though, and I guarantee that if you think your web pages do not have unnecessary code in them, you’re probably lying to yourself. This is largely due to the high number of websites built in Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive. These programs are notorious for inserting massive amounts of unnecessary code, making your web pages look very cluttered to search engine spiders. A good idea is to have one of our SEO experts examine your web pages for unnecessary code and make recommendations. They are among the best in the business. You’d be truly amazed at the impact it has on your site load time as well as your search engine rankings.

8: Lastly, try to avoid using too many tables on a web page, as overuse of tables is not good for seo purposes. A great alternative for using tables that web designers rarely consider is the use of div tags.

5 Steps To Optimizing Your Website For Google And Yahoo

The mere thought of SEO is enough to send most webmasters into a flutter. A good ranking in the search engines is a sure-fire way to make money from a website, yet it is not an easy task. But while the exact ranking algorithm used by top search engines is one of the world's best kept secrets there are some basic principals you should always keep in mind:

1. Site Design

The structure of your site is important because this is how search engines see how each page relates to another. When your site is spidered, the search engine will quickly be able to judge the relevance and quality of your site from the sitemap.

Creating a good site map involves naming pages using your top keywords, while at the same time ensuring you are giving it an accurate and succinct name. Keyword spamming has penalties! Google's sitemap is a good example at http://www.google.com/sitemap.html.

2. Optimize for your audience, not for the search engine.

Search engines prefer sites on a specific subject because specialized information is more beneficial to search engine users. So, for example, your site would have a better chance of ranking highly if it was dedicated specifically to lamp shades rather than home furnishings or lighting in general. This is because someone searching for 'lamp shade' would be better satisfied with a website full of information specifically relating to lamp shades, rather than a general home furnishings site with only a paragraph or two dedicated to lamp shades.

Many sites have been successful by focusing solely on providing a website that meets the needs of their audience, rather than the needs of the search engines. If possible, survey your users to find out what they want out of the site and if they have any suggestions. The more you know about your audience, the better the design you'll be able to create. Make it easy for visitors to interact on the site and for you to answer their questions too.

3. Label your internal text links and image alt tags

Why? The main reason is that search engine spiders can't read images. Anything without text means nothing to the spider. Other benefits of labeling images include the ability for the image to be searchable in browsers such as Google Image search. Image text also enables visibly impaired visitors to use your site more effectively and it helps to generally improve the text content of your page for search purposes. An image label is just a clear description of the image using keywords. Just don't include too many keywords in the alt text as there are penalties for keyword stuffing!

4. Update your site regularly

Your site ranking will be enhanced if the search engine spiders can see it is being updated frequently. Aim to add new content at least once a week to create a living site. The more frequently Google has to come back to respider your site, the better you will rank. Pages that don't change will eventually be downgraded in favor of sites whose pages are fresher.

5. Link to Subject-related sites

Good quality backlinks are vital to SEO as these tell the search engine spiders that the site is popular and/or important. Backlinks are links that are directed to your website from another site. Thus, linking to relevant sites is a great way to increase your search engine ranking. If you can, try to implement circular linking, where the sites you link to also link to each other and back to you again. For example, you link to Site A and Site B, who both link back to you and also link to each other. The more clusters of links you can get like this, the more relevant your site will be deemed to be.

Did you realize that broken links can actually harm your search engine optimization? If you set up a link, and your linking partner pulls that link in 6 months time, your ranking could reduce. Thus it is critical to check your links regularly to ensure that you are being linked back to.

Search engine optimization is not something that can be done once and then left alone. It requires constant effort and attention. The best way to keep up to date with new SEO developments is to continue read commentary and recent articles by SEO experts.
In general, remember that the top websites are always the ones people want to use, such as the BBC, eBay, Apple, and NASA. If your main priority is creating the best website for your users, then you are on the right track.

Rate:

SEO: Self-taught And Loving It

Many online businesses like to work with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm that guarantees placement in search engine rankings. At first blush, this sounds like a great idea. After all, who doesn't want to be at the top of the search engine rankings? If a company can guarantee to get you there, why not use them?

While there may be SEO firms that have your best interest in mind there are an equal number that simply do whatever they have to do to get your site in the number one position. Sometimes the methods used are not well accepted and the results are generally temporary.

The reason this is often the case is that the SEO firm uses keywords or phrases that may get you a top ranking, but only because the keywords or phrases they chose were little used and might not even coincide with anything your site is designed to sell.

In many cases your website will be stuffed with keywords and phrases that have little relevancy to what your site was designed for. In the end, many businesses have ventured away from SEO firms and have worked to learn the skills of SEO on their own.

Simply put, it is much easier, and is more practical long-term to learn the skills of SEO on your own. You can utilize sites designed to help determine keywords that may actually be useful to you while avoiding (or minimizing) terms that are overused. The development of the website should be about long-term results so the use of tools that only serve to temporarily prop up your website may not be in your best interest.

Website owners also need to understand that the process of gaining a higher ranking is a long-term goal. By consistently optimizing your site for a search engine keyword or phrase you not only keep a focal point to your website, but allow the search engines to view you as a credible, trusted website that deserves a higher ranking.

There are plenty of online resources that can help you become an expert in the art of SEO techniques. You may likely see greater long-term results by simply learning all you can about SEO and developing a plan that you can feel comfortable implementing.

If you have trouble finding the time, you might have an associate willing to learn the skills to improve the overall performance of your online business.