Website Design With SEO (Part-3)

Main Content On Top

This can be done more efficiently by using Cascading Style Sheets. When designing your website, make sure to position your main content near the top of your HTML code with CSS. If all your important text is far down below the code, most search engine crawlers won’t even bother to reach the end of the page, if you have lot of code on top blocking the valuable content.

File Names And Directory Structure

To have optimized web pages, you need to know how to name your files and directories. Let’s talk about directory structures first. Make sure to keep the level of the folders to a minimum depth. What I mean is do not create bunch of folders that look something likt this.http://www.domain.com/mydir1/mydir2/mydir3/mydir4/my-topic.For a regular website this is a SEO nightmare, if all your files located on the 4rd level.

If you are running a blog, by default your address might look like thishttp://www.domain.com/post-date-with-year/my-topic.This is ok, it is search friendly, but not optimized yet.

The correct way to do this is to have the file name or topic at the root level. For example http://www.domain.com/my-topic

Dynamic pages with scripts or blogging software, the urls look something like thishttp://www.domain.com/?p=188.

The problem is some search engines will list your page, but it won’t be optimized because there are no keywords associated in the file name, instead all it sees is a ?p=188. This is a database query url. You can simply change this to something like the above example with Apache Mod Re-Write function.

For most blogging platforms, this can be easily configurable by going to options and changing the Perma Link Structure in administration panel.

Link Structure and Sitemaps

Make sure all the pages in your site are linked to each other so search engine robots will find them faster and won’t left out any pages. Also include a sitemap link on every page. A sitemap for those who don’t know, is a web page with all the links to all the files on your website.

Sitemaps makes it easier for visitors to look for information faster at times. Just like link structures, sitemaps also contribute vastly to the whole seo process by letting the crawlers know where the files located at.

I hope you learn alot from this three part serious on how to have a perfect design strategy with the combination of balanced design practices and search engine optimization methods.