Website Design With SEO (Part-1)

There is an old saying, If you build it, they will come. When it comes to websites and your visitors, this is not the case, not even close. How do your visitors know where you located at in this infinite world of the world wide web. This is where internet search engines come to play. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet are from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista etc.

As a web designer it is your duty to know how to create search engine friendly and optimized websites if you want your visitors to know that you exist. By designing a search engine friendly website, you will be able to rank high easily in search engines and obtain more users.

All the major search engines use programs called crawlers, robots, or some times called spiders to index sites to list on their search result pages. When they go through your page, they follow links to to all your internal pages, reads the content of the site and record it in their database. This is the information your visitors see when they search for your site.

The List : Follow This And You Will Be Ok

For the search engine spiders or crawlers to index your site correctly and easily, you must know what elements not to include and the correct HTML coding methods to use. Here is a list get started.

• Avoid using Frames
• Do not use Images nor Flash to deliver important content
• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of Tables
• Correct HTML tags are very important
• Use correct Meta Tag techniques
• Main content should be at the top of the page in your HTML
• Use correct file names and directory structure
• Site’s Link Structure / Sitemap is a must

Websites And Frames

To make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames at all costs. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site. Another side effects is, frames make it difficult for your visitors to add bookmark to a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Main Content In Regular Text

Do not put your web site’s main content inside images or Flash elements. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code. So if you present important information and keywords in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

I’ve seen many websites that use these wrong techniques, surprisingly some professional designers forget this rule. You need to know when and what medium to use for the most important asset of your site, THE CONTENT. Content is the king, so make it stand up and get better results.