Website Design For Search Engines

It’s easy to get caught up with the visual aspect of your website design. What you have to remember is that search engines don’t see your website the way you, and I do. Search engine spiders, also called bots, don’t see pictures or colors, they know that graphics are on your page but not what they look like. What search engine spiders play the largest role in building site traffic and what they look for is content and structure.

Use good markup on your pages and have a clear structure.

Avoid using a non-standard page layout, navigation, headings, and content should be clear to the search engines. Navigation is usually first, at the top of your markup. Make sure to use heading tags like H1, H2, etc. for all of your headings and sub headings. Be as specific as you can with which html tags you use, for example: if you a re quoting someone use the "blockquote" tag.

Keywords should be consistent and concise.

Search engines don’t like it when you repeat keywords too often in the same text area. Spamming keywords used to be very common but now it’s a major taboo. Keywords should occur naturally and often in your text. If you’re using a keyword like "content" for example, refrain from using words like "info" or "substance" which can mean the same thing.

Search engine bots read html.

It is important to keep in mind that search engine bots read html, they don’t read javascript. Don’t use javascript to place content into your page, search engines will skip right over, or worse they will stop reading your page all together. Javascript is a highly useful language for web programming and sometimes it’s necessary to use it to get the functionality your site needs, but be careful how you use it.

Use relevant meta tags.

Meta tags are important for determining what to look for in your content, but they don’t carry as much weight in assigning page rank. It is good to have all of the necessary meta tags like: keywords, description and author. You need to have relevant meta tags to get good search engine position for your keywords. When choosing your title, description and keywords always check to see if the keywords you are using are being used by your potential visitors and your competition.

Splash pages are bad.

It may seem like a cool idea to make a splash page to display a huge logo or some Flash animation, but search engines don’t like them. The last you want is for a search engine spider to come to your site and see nothing but an image on the first page or worse a Flash file that they can’t read. Splash pages can be what keep your site from gaining page rank and visitors so it’s best to avoid using one if you can.

Include alt attributes in your image tags.

You always want to include an alt attribute in your image tags for two reasons: first it tells visitors who may not be able to see the image what the image is and second it tells the search engines what the image is. Remember that Search engines don’t see what is in the image, so it might as well be blank. You can test your alt attributes by setting your browser to not view images or by removing them from your images folder on your site. If you don’t see text where the images should be then your going to have problems with search engines.

Fill your pages with content.

Links from other sites to yours have a huge impact on your page rank with the search engines. The best way to get those links is to have good content on your pages that other people would want to share on their own web sites. If visitors come to your site and find great content they will bookmark your site or link to it from their own sites and blogs. Search engines are all about content ad helping people find good content so always work on building content and you will get more traffic and higher page rank.