Search Engine Friendly Web Design
"Venue Communications, Inc.'s designers are experts at building search engine friendly web sites."
1.
Research highly targeted keywords - do this even before you begin designing
otherwise you may have to go back and clean up some of your web site design.
Use a keyword research tool, such as Wordtracker
or Google
Suggest to
research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your
web site. Wordtracker will show how many people have searched for that particular
keyword over several search engines within the last 60 days.
2.
Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases
that you can includewithin your web pages. After having completed
the above research, you should have found the keywords that
were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small
number of competing web sites.
3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top
of each web page. Weave your keywords within this text being
careful not have them so close together that your copy reads
strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines
as well as your web site visitors.
4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are
the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has
lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include
it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your
keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag
should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site.
In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest
benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include
the most frequently used keywords contained within your web
page.
5. Include Heading Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers
will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your
web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest
font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text
of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases
placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword
meta tags.
6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description
for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has 2 purposes:
a) visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this could help
your site's rankings.
7. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images
on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web
site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi. Slice
large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.
8. Find incoming links (backward links) - web sites that link
to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that
are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more to do a link
exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your
web site. This means your site has a greater chance of being
indexed quickly as well as getting a boost in its rankings.
Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all
your internal pages to your home page. This will increase the
number of links pointing to your home page.
9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design
throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement
a consistent text (or layout) style for your web site. It will
also enable you to easily update your whole site should you
wish to make any future changes.
10. Place any script code into external files - when using
javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar)
it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down
the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the
script code in an external file reduces the code to just one
line.
11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A
DOCTYPE ( "document
type declaration") informs the validator which version of HTML you're
using for your web pages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages:
your markup and CSS won't validate without them. i.e.
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"]
DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning
of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac,
and IE6/Win.
12. Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra
code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages.
Check your html code by running it through a html validator such as W3C
Markup Validation Service.
Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submit
your website to the search engines and get ready for lots of
targeted traffic.
You now have built a profitable search engine friendly web
site.
