Website Design With SEO (Part-2)

These days, most people have broadband connections, but there are still alot of people that use the regular dial-up lines or slower connections. believe me you do not want to lose those visitors.

The old Table based layouts are easier to design, but when it comes to loading times, they are pretty slow and hard to maintain. Since this is about SEO, I’m going to discuss more on that aspect for now.

Tables create lot of code. Lot of tags which is not search engine friendly. CSS short for Cascading Style Sheets, split the formatting and the site’s content into two different parts.

This means the search engine crawlers only see your site’s main text not the formatting code. CSS does this by adding all the formatting code to a stylesheet and linking that stylesheet to the HTML page. This is the preferred what to use stylesheets.

This way you have a clean code. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages more lighter making them search engine optimized and faster to load.

Correct HTML Tags (Feed The Search Engines Good Spider Food)

Search engines give serious consideration to your HTML tags when they are calculating your site’s page ranking. Think of your web page as a news paper.

You have the main headline on top then a sub heading, then paragraphs and less important headings underneath, etc. This is how your website should be structured.

For example always Use <h1> tags for your main headline or topic. (Only use <h1> tag once per page). <h2> for less important topics, <p> for paragraphs, <strong> for important sections of text, and all the other heading tags for suitable places.

If these tags are not used correctly, search engine will never know what is more important and what is not, leaving your page rank to be lower.

META Tags

There are many META tags available for you. I will go over some of the ones related to SEO. Use these accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it.

The first is keyword and description tags. Search engines like Google never rely on these tags for your page rank, but most of the other major ones do. For example MSN uses META tags in their algorithm for PR (page rank).

Keep the description and keywords to a minimum level, usually 10 keywords is enough, and have a short and meaningful description. DO NOT over use them or you will get panelized and your PR will drop on the search listings.

You can control the timing of the search spider or crawler by adding<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”15 Days” /> tag within the head section of the HTML.

This is a brief overview of some of the tags use for search engine optimization. By using META Tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more efficiently and frequently.