In this fierce cut throat competition , your website/blog should not only look good but rather it should be searched as well. To my surprise a chunk of web designers tend to ignore it.
According to a survey conducted on my friend’s blog only 1 out of 10 web designers think of SEO as an important factor while designing, and 24% don’t even know what SEO is forget about asking them for a SEO Friendly Webdesign…Well that’s quite shocking.
It often proves to be tedious to make a design which is cool as well as SEO friendly. So here I have gathered Tips To Make SEO Friendly Web Design.
1. Don’t Use Splash Pages
Many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.
This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.
2. Avoid Overuse Of Ajax
Implementing Ajax particularly for navigation is nothing but a SEO BLUNDER, because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.
Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.
So it can’t be considered as SEO Friendly.
3. Empty Image Alt Attribute
You should always describe your image in the
alt attribute simply because search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.So a good Webdesign consists of images with alt attributes.
4. Put Your Navigation At The Top
Avoid creating the 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.
5. Make Use Of Headlines
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.
6. Try Not To Use Flash If 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.
7. Make Lesser Use of 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.
8. 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.
9. Use External Cascading Styling Sheets and Java Script Files
It reduces page size and your web page will also load faster. It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.
10. Avoid Using Too Complex Tables Particularly in Navigation Bar
When laying out your pages try 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.
11. Use Graphics Cautiously
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.
12. 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.
13. Remember The Tags
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.