SEO! SEO! SEO!, I started web designing and this SEO was always there with an eye over me.
Search Engine Optimization, a very important combination of characters for web designers and web developers. Every Client want their website's link to be shown in the first page of Google. So it becomes obvious for we designers and developers to take care of this, and SEO is the only way possible. SEO's has two aspects
ON-SITE and
OFF-SITE.
On-site SEO includes those things which we can do in our site such as HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure etc. etc.
Second is
Off-Site SEO which includes those things on which we dont have much control, like how many people will link to yor website.
Among these two aspects the first one i.e.,On-site SEO is where we can concentrate. There are few things which a designer should take care of while designing a website. These are things which I practice to optimize.
1. Content is the main food for Web Spiders/Crawlers. and their main target is Home page of any website. So, your design of a home page should be good looking but it should contain lots of relevant content.
2. Using big flash banner on the home page and giving a link "
Click To Enter The Site" will lead you nowhere. Web crawlers are like a text-based browser, they can't read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. If you are using important keywords of the site in Flash and Image then its useless.
3. Using navigation made up of Flash is useless, they may look attractive but the links in the Flash menu are not followed by the Search Engines. So, Its better to make navigation with normal texts in anchor tags.
4. If you want to make your navigation look better and want to use images written in a stylish font, then you should keep few things in practice like giving a "title" attribute e.g. for 'About Us' menu item <img> tag's
alt and
title attribute should be populated with proper key words.
Search Engine's can't see images so your
alt attribute will help the Search Engine in illustrating what your page is relevant for. The '
alt' attribute of every image used in the website should be defined properly with relevant keywords.
5. Relevant keywords used should be in context of your website's target words. such as if you are using "Cars and Fishes" are they relevant? ....not at all! Han! if you are using Boats and Fishes its Ok, they are relevant.
These keywords, meta tags things should be looked after by the developer, its their responsibility to use proper relevant keywords, with less repetition. Let's concentrate over the practices which a designer should follow.
6. <H1> tags play a very important role in SEO. The title of the content should be used within <H1>. Search Engines concentrate on the <H> tags used in the web page. Too much use of <H> tag will push your webpage to spam.
7. Too much use of keywords is harmful for your webpage. Main areas where one should use keywords:
------the Title Tag
------the Page URL
------<H1> or <H2>
------first paragraph of content
------atleast 3 times in the body content
2% of keyword density is enough for SEO, that means 2 times for every 100 words.
8. Learn More and Click Here links anchor text can be very useful for SEO but it should be appended with few keywords like "Learn more about (keyword topic)".
9. And a very important thing which we are using alot these days is Ajax, excess use of Ajax is not useful for SEO. Coz, Ajax loads content dynamically, so its not possible for Search Engines to crawl through those content.
10. Title tag used for each page should be different and should be relevant to the respective page. Page title is what appears in search results. If you are using "www.sitename.com: About Us" again for another page you are using "www.sitename.com: Our Services", then its a wrong method. If you really want to repeat your site name in every page title then you should use it this way "our Services:www.sitename.com". Page title and description should not exceed 60 characters in total.
These are few things which we should keep in mind while designing a website. One thing I suggest that just design your website for human use, the machine crawler will find your site itself. Just make it easy to use.
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