Vital Things You Will Want To Appreciate When Building Your Site About SEO

There are some crucial things that you really do need to know when you are designing a site and you want it to be pulling in the search engine traffic. A few people take this to the extreme and create code that is merely 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.

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

Meta Data – You have the title, description and keywords meta tags and a few people go overboard by stuffing every conceivable keyword into these lists. Don’t! The title and description are maybe what search engine visitors will see first around your website 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 round and people will tell you to use heaps 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 though 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 site and find all of your pages, so be sure that 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 just 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 merely good to make sure that search engines could follow the links, but also it increases your web site 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 load lighter in code and actually simpler 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 web site the best it could be for the search engines, then avoid the spammy techniques for example 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.

Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a Merseyside Web Design service. For more useful tips, call into the web design blog.

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