SEO Recap – Search Engine Friendly Web Design

Many web design companies state that they create search engine friendly websites. SEO companies and SEO professionals remind you that you should have a search engine friendly websites. What do they actually mean by search engine friendly website?

SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY WEB DESIGN IS SIMPLE AND CLEAN.

The basic factors that need to be considered when attempting to that make your website into a search engine friendly website include your URL structure, coding, tax, script and text. Each of these may seem like a small thing, but when taken together you can create a website that is very search engine friendly meaning that it is easily crawled indexed, and categorized as relevant to your niche by the search engine spiders.

URL structure is crucial for making your website into a search engine friendly website; you have to be consistent and use correct URLs throughout your site.

The coding of your website should follow all accepted standards. Poor coding standards can make your website unfriendly to search engines. Tags are important to both search engines and visible results (what your visitors see),m so make sure you take advantage of all opportunities for tagging. It’s not just what your users see that make your website search engine friendly, but it is also the codes at the backend which matter to the search engines.

Your website should above all be XHTML compliant. This means you need to have XHTML validation done to check for errors, all of which should be rectified at the earliest possible date. An XHTML validation service can help you with this; many SEO firms offer this service. When you are designing a website, XHTML errors often pop up, so having it checked and fixed will help your website be much more search engine friendly. Include both XML sitemap for search engines and a regular HTML sitemap for the users.

Your websites should avoid Flash, Frames and Java script as much as possible as search engines have problems with crawling websites with frames, don’t like Java Script and can’t read Flash – just the text around it.

Include as much text as possible on your home page and minimize the use of images. When you need to use images, use them sparingly, and add appropriate names for the images as well as Alt text. Tagging all your images with the same format will help you find them later as well.

Keep the web pages short so they load fast. Ensure all the links are active; broken links and 404 errors can affect your website’s ranking and can irritate online users who will leave your site due to page cannot be found error messages.

Avoid drop down menus if possible. Search engine spiders find it difficult to drill down the drop down menus used for your website’s navigation. Use regular static menus for website navigation instead! You should never have more than four clicks to reach any main page on your site. Also use ’breadcrumb links’ to help navigation issues.

Finally, choose a reliable hosting provider so that your website has the highest up time possible, and add fresh content often so Google will continue to return and re index your website.