10 Important Web Design Tips: SEO Friendly Website

[luoren]

http://ta.cn03.net/articles/web_design_development/8/11528.html

A website should firstly be searched out by visitors before talking about attracting or retaining those visitors. Nowadays, a ¨well designed website?? does not only relate to a web site??s visual attractiveness but more importantly, how friendly it is with search engines.

Below are 10 SEO friendly website designing tips where web designers should pay attention to during the early stage of their web designing process.

1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website . If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines.

2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.

3. Every page should contain the ¨title?? and ¨description?? tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.

4. Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.

5. Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load.

[luoren]

6. Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.

7. Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.

9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.

10. Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes.

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[Webnauts]

1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website . If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines.
That depends on how the code is structured. And not how it looks like in the browser. And in practice the golden rule is to design sites for humans and not engines. How the code should look like, check for an example our web site http://www.seoworkers.com


2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.
That is true. They are very important and they can be formatted with CSS.


3. Every page should contain the ¨title?? and ¨description?? tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.
Title: The maximum number of characters (including spaces) recommended for this tag is 100. Please be aware that most search engines will display no more than 70 characters (including spaces) in their search results.

Description: The maximum number of characters recommended for this tag is 200. Be aware that most search engines will display no more than the first 160 characters (including spaces) of this tag.


4. Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.
There are techniques solving this issue. Make them accessible (a text alternative) or check this tutorial for more: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Optimize-Your-Flash-Site-for-Search-Engines/


5. Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load.
Use alt tags for humans. Not for engines. If you try to add keywords to your images which are not in context with them, you can be spamming. See here how they must be used: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=70255

Just my two cents.

[Webnauts]

6. Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.
I agree.


7. Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.
That is true. If you still have to use frames though, then use the title attribute for them. Also add a sort of site map for your site in <noframes>. And make sure that they are text links, using a title attribute containing the title of the target page.


8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.
That is true. Don't go more than 3rd level if you are using catch-respected tables.


9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.
I agree. And remember: The food of the search engines is content (text), and not code.


10. Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes.
That is true. In every case avoid using Frontpage.

And by the way our articles too: http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/ :)

[incrediblehelp]

Webnauts this poster seem to be simply cutting and pasting articles from other websites and posting them here.

[Webnauts]

Oh my gosh! What's happening here?

[Webnauts]

Rule 7 updated!

[janeth]

You should build your site for the visitor and not the search engines.

It does not matter where you rank if your site want convert the visitor into a customer it is just a waste of time.

[scot184]

What's the problem with the left-hand navigation panel? Does the spider read the left-hand panel borders before the words? And if so, will it really make that much of a difference?

This ticky-tack stuff is getting ridiculous, the the amount of SEO spam out there is making the Internet even more unbearable.

Why are people spending sooo much time on the page structure, while wasting precious time they could be spending on creating quality content?

Clearly content is king, and page structure is a distant second.