Crucial Things You Need to Know When Designing Your Website Around SEO

Filed in SEO, Search Engines on Jul.14, 2010 By Keith Lunt

When you are designing a website and search engine visitors are essential, you need to consider a few aspects of the design. This does not mean creating spammy code, but well written and useful code. Read more now!

There are several crucial things that you really do need to know when you are designing a website and you want it to be pulling in the search engine visitors. Some people take this to the extreme and create code that is just basically a load of spam, which I cannot recommend, but there are a few consideration that will keep it on track and potentially make it a better site.

Selecting keywords – Do not get carried away by attempting to optimise a single page for loads of search engine terms. Just concentrate on one or two phrases per page.

Meta Data – You have the title, description and keywords meta tags and some people go overboard by stuffing every conceivable keyword into these lists. Don’t! The title and description are probably what search engine visitors will see first about your site so instead concentrate more on writing them meaningfully and naturally and including your key phrases once within each. But make it read well!

Emphasis – Read around and people will tell you to use plenty of bold, underlined and italic text plus h1, h2 and h3 to display your keywords. Don’t! Again, make it natural and it will read better for the visitor. Use bold, headings etc to highlight for your readers, not the search engines.

The page content – If you haven’t guessed already, the best page content for the search engines is actually whatever is the best page content for your readers. Google near enough ignores your page content although Yahoo and Bing do put some weight on Titles and Descriptions.

Navigation – Now we are talking! You want the search engines to be able to crawl your website and find all of your pages, so make sure that your navigation is not hidden behind clever flash animations or javascript routines. If you want to use image links do so as search engines should follow them (this is the only time the image’s alt attribute is actually read), but it is also a good idea to repeat the links in the page footer as text links. This is not only good to make sure that search engines can follow the links, but also it increases your website accessibility.

Use CSS style sheets – Avoid laying your page out using tables! A table should be used to layout data and nested tables should be avoided at all costs. Instead, code your website in CSS, which is a lot lighter in code and actually easier to maintain. If you then move the CSS out of the page into a stylesheet this also reduces the amount of code on the page, increasing the text to content ratio. It is also better (again) for your website accessibility.

In short, to make your website the best it can be for the search engines, then avoid the spammy techniques such as alt attributes that went out a couple of years ago and design a website for maximum accessibility. Keep the content clean and the best for your readers and you should be onto a winner with the search engines.