When you design a website it is imperative that you consider how the search engines will see it. The first step in getting ranked with the search engines is a well thought out design and plan.
Search engines do not care how the page looks but what the code is like behind all the pretty fonts and graphics. Avoid a messy, overly-complicated, unorganized site. Do not stuff your site with repetitive keywords that will just get you a Google Slap. Give the search engine spiders a clear understanding of what your site is about. Makes your keywords relative to your content and theme.
Understanding how the search engine crawlers see you site is important if you want to rank in the search engines. They do not see your website the same way a browser does. You can use a couple of tools to do this. A text browser called Lynx lets you view your page as a bot sees it, or can use WebCEO free edition which is a great tool …
Just remember to design your site with the search engines in mind. Check to see if your HTML code is valid and correct any errors. Broken code makes it hard for the spiders to read your page. Even a simple mistake like an unclosed bracket can result in your page not being included in search pages.
Include a valid “document type” at the top of your page. This lets the search engine spiders know what kind of code your page is written in. The doc type will let the search engines know if what code is being presented, like XHTML or HTML. The Doc type declaration has to be the very first thing on your page.
Avoid using images as links for internal linking between pages on your site. Use regular text links with keyword anchor text the search engines can read. Images as links, should have the keyword phrase of the page you are linking to in the ALT attribute of the image tag.
Don’t use Javascript links. Spiders can’t follow them and there’s nowhere to put your target keywords. If you really MUST use these kind of links, repeat the link elsewhere on the page in plain text. Use CSS instead. It’s clean and the search engines can read CSS.
Always check your site for broken links in your pages. WebCEO does this plus checks for syntax and other problems. The spiders dislike dead links which indicate to the search engines that the site is not well maintained or up to date, negatively effecting your search engine position. It also is frustrating for your visitors and the most likely will not come again if you have links that do not work.
Upload a robots.txt file to the root directory of your website. The robots.txt will tell the search engines where your sitemap is and also you can block crawlers from accessing pages that will result duplicate content. Also use robots.txt to prevent search engines indexing anything you don’t want public. Make sure your robots.txt is error free since errors will keep spiders from crawling your site all together.
It takes time, effort and practice in web design to make a site SEO friendly. Good keyword research, good design practices, fresh content and a few basic rules will help you get ranked.
Tags: SEO Tips, SEO tools, Website Design
