SEO Web
Design
5 Hot Tips To
Designing an SEO Friendly Website
The purpose of having a website is to have an external
representation and presence of your company online. Other than
providing information of your business to your potential
customers, website should also serve as a channel for people to
enquire about products or services. If you run an e-commerce
site, you want online sales. If you are providing offline
products and services, you need prospects to find your website
and enquire about your service.
When it comes to online marketing, search engines usually bring
the most traffic to a website. The traffic from search engines
is highly targeted because searchers already have the intent to
find out more about your products and services when they search
on search engines. Therefore, you need to get your website to
be ranked high on organic search result page for keywords or
key phrases that are relevant to what you are offering. This is
called search engine optimization or SEO. However, most
websites are not SEO-friendly which makes it impossible to get
it ranks well for important keywords.
Let me highlight some of 5 important tips that your designer
should follow if you want your website to rank well on search
engines:
1. Search engine friendly naming conventions for all your
pages
The naming convention for every page should be search engine
friendly. It is best to place important keywords that you wish
to optimize as your naming convention. Just make sure that it
is relevant to the content of the page. Separate words by using
(-) such as "search-engine-optimization.html" so as to
facilitate crawling.
2. Do not build your site with Flash or frames
Websites that are built entirely on Flash or frames will
prevent search engine robots from crawling the content of your
site, which will be a disaster for SEO. You should not use a
splash page as both search engine spiders and website visitors
do not like it. Avoid using JavaScript too.
3. Remember to tag your images with keyword-rich
description
For every image on your website, it has an Alt tag. You should
place important keywords or key phrases inside here to describe
the image. And do not place text as an image inside your
website. This will prevent search engine spiders from crawling
the content and will destroy all your other SEO effort.
4. Place keywords inside your Title and Meta tags
Title is the most important place to put your keywords. Most
companies just put their company names in the Title tag which
is not enough. Place keywords that you wish to rank well on
search engines at the front of the Title and inside your Meta
Description tags.
5. Have a sitemap on your website
A sitemap allows search engine spiders to follow all the links
and index every pages of your website easily, which will assist
your optimization process greatly.
Lastly, remember not to use images as your navigation
buttons or links. If you really need to use images, do provide
a text navigation links on your page so that spiders can read
them.
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOM, an online marketing
agency that provides Singapore SEO services.
Check out more about SEO at http://www.optimalonlinemarketing.com
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