The Marketers®

How to design a Search Engine Friendly Website

Designing a Search Engine friendly website is never complicated, but needs enthusiasm and consistency, whereas communication between the graphic designer, content writer, webmaster and SEO analyst should be constant. In this article you’ll certainly get some new ideas and tips to make an affective search engine friendly website.


When we talk about search engine friendly website then you must keep in mind that the website should be both visually appealing to visitors and contextually appealing to search engines. If you only design a website which is search engine friendly can cause huge loss, as search engine deny artificial trapping and tracking. So the content and the design both should be natural and human friendly, too.

According to Bruce Clay, “Strategic Website development is the development of an integrated technical and marketing design that allow the website owner to realize their objectives for the website”

Basic Tips to Design a Search Engine Friendly Website

Some basic tips that needs to be implemented while designing and developing a search engine friendly website

Site should be both visually appealing to visitors and contextually appealing to the search engines. In other words creating a website that is easily navigable, visually appealing and gives your visitors what they are looking for, will encourage visitors to stay longer and come back often.

Don’t use grimy colors. Color patterns should be professional.
Use both left or right and top navigation. For contact details you can use footer as navigation.

Highlight the site objectives on your main page. What is site is about?

Do not put excessive stuff on your site main page. Use anchor links to navigate site external pages.

Never stuff your site pages with excessive keywords. Because search engine seriously taking this matter on their behalf and penalize your website for spamming.

Use at least 250 words as close to the top of your HTML code as possible. Within those 250 words of content, you need to make sure that you are using keywords in a manner that makes sense to a reader and will allow the search engines to see your site as a subject matter expert.

Use 60- 80 character in page title to navigate the search engine to index the page individually. Each page of the website should have its separate page title. This could help search engines to identify the pages individually.

Use 200 to 25 character in page description tag, this could help both visitors and search engines to see what your page is about?
Don’t use excessive anchor text link on the index page, use the links which are directly meeting to the internal site pages. PR factor is involved.

Use bold and italic around the main keywords, this could rank up your main keywords in a good search engine positions.

Use a combination of both extensive and targeted keywords words of your website. It is better to prepare a short list of words earlier that your site is trying to promote and/ or words about your industry. Always use the keywords properly.

Optimize the website for the targeted keywords before submitting your website to the search engines. (I’ll explain later each search engine needs and requirements).

Use Alt tags to validate your images and enable them visually appealing to the search engines.

Use correct English and grammar in the contents. Search engine always appreciate a proper grammatically correct and English written website.

Site Architecture

If you have done the basic SEO work, then its time to look at your website architect. What common mistake we often do while developing a website architect. While the keyword and some other basic SEO work are being done, your designer should be working on site templates and site architecture. Let’s make it wise and an open talk.

Direct your designer to develop a site template by using proper CSS, IRFRAMES, TABLES and some external JavaScript of any other script, which enables search engine spiders to crawl your site without getting bogged down with the html code. This course of action enables search engine to go the page and quickly set up what your site is about. This will resolve whether or not your get ranked.

Let your developer to create content to ensure that the pages that are going to be submitted grasp at least 250 words of unique and valuable content. This needs a proper communication between the designer and content developer.

Content developer should be operational closely with the SEO analyst to make sure that the keywords are being used correctly all the way through the pages of the website.

SEO analyst must read the site content one by one and check them carefully. Some times we often do a little mistake of not using H1, H2, and H3 header tags, etc. He or she should ensure that the links on the pages are working properly and are linking to the destination pages. We normally used to call this HTML validation process.

Site Optimization Tips

This excerpt from an interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo, is very much worth noting. If there were 3-5 site optimization tips you were to recommend to web masters, what would they be?

Usability comes before SEO – better yet, they should work hand in hand…

SEO isn’t just about H1 tags and title tags – more importantly, you need traffic…

You can listen to what everyone else preaches about what works for SEO or you can find out for yourself.

Conclusion

Designing a search engine friendly web site is not difficult, but it is time consuming. As long as you are prepared to be methodical; do careful keyword research; create unique, interesting, well-written content; and work closely with all the members of your team, you will be rewarded with high engine rankings and recognition in your field of expertise.