SEO Web Design
Search engine optimization and web design are two elements that go hand in hand; although many people do not realize the importance of the relevancy between SEO and SEO Web Design. What good is the best search engine optimization if your website is not designed efficiently; and what good is a well-designed website if nobody is able to find it due to it not showing up on the front pages of the major search engines? You can see how the two go together and how they each relate to each other when you really think about it. There are also many ways in which search engine optimization can be used within the web design as well to further optimize your website so that it is indexed and ranked well by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
If you are designing a website with SEO in mind there are numerous things which you will want to consider such as the HTML coding and markup. Some design elements such as flash media will cause the search engines crawlers are not able to index the page correctly; this often leads to less than optimal search engine rankings. Other element which is essential in web design which is going to have a huge impact on search engine optimization is the domain name which you choose for your site. Choose one or two keywords which are highly relent to your products or services offered in order to help your site be indexed accordingly; this will help you to receive more targeted traffic from search engines.
SEO Web Design – On-Page Factors
As a website designer you are going to be responsible for all of the on-page search engine optimization. As a designer you need to consider all of the different ways in which you can incorporate SEO into the design of the website in order to help visitors to be able to find your webpage by using search engines. A poorly designed site is going to be losing out on a high volume of traffic; this loss of traffic is going to mean bad things for your businesses bottom line. Without traffic coming from the search engines; even the best designed websites are not able to be found.
When you are in charge of web design it is essential that you are very familiar with the way in which search engines work; knowing this is going to help you take advantage of all of the ways in which you can use web design within your search engine optimization. The first thing that you should be well aware of as a designer is the algorithm of the major search engines. Due to the differences in algorithm of the major search engines it is essential that the site is designed in a way which will allow it to be rated and indexed in a way which will help it to raise in the search engines rankings. Some of the things which you will be in charge of when designing a webpage, which directly affect SEO are; internal linking, the structure of the site, and the choice of targeted keywords to be used in the domain name as well as throughout the website.
SEO Web Design – Mistakes
There are some common mistakes which you should be aware of so that you do not make the same mistakes. The first one is to use what is known as a flash page; these pages are typically a single lik which will direct the individual to the website. The problem is when you do this the search engines are not able to effectively penetrate this flash object; this means that due to this they will not be able to crawl the content on your website in order to properly index it. If your site is not indexed then it is not going to show up on the search engines results; this is a huge mistake which will drastically diminish the traffic to your website.
SEO Web Design Done Right
You also want to be sure that have the proper linking within your content which will allow the search engines to be able to crawl more than just your home page. If the search engines are able to “see” your other pages and crawl the content there, they are then going to help you to raise your rankings with the search engines. Another common mistake is the use of flash players on a website. Although they may look cool, they will not allow indexing by the search engines; therefore, any links within these flash menus are not going to be able to be located and indexed as well. This is also true of images and other flash media; you want to avoid using these sources as a way to embed keywords because they are not able to be read this information and index it accordingly.
Linking with SEO Web Design
You also want to carefully choose your links; the text which you use for the link is going to be indexed by the search engines so be sure to use keywords which you would like to be ranked based on. Many web designers make the mistake of using words such as click here as a link within their site. This is not a good idea however because the terms “click here” are going to be used when referencing your website. You also want to mix up the anchor text which you use for this purpose so that the crawlers do not recognize it as spam which will affect your rankings negatively. Choose different keyword strains or use variations of the keywords in order to mix things up.
The last and final tip that I would like to give you which you should avoid doing has to do with the title text of your individual pages within the website. You want to be sure that you use a different set of target keywords for each page which you have on your website. If you use the same target keywords within these tags then the search engines are going to see them as duplicate pages with the same or similar content; by switching up this title text, it is going to allow the search engines to index these pages separately. This is another key factor in SEO web design that should not be ignored.
