Excellent SEO Tips For Better Web Design

Though there are millions of websites on the internet only some of them perform well while others fail to get the desired traffic. Have you ever questioned why many of the websites go unnoticed on the web and why they do not get any traffic? If you want to drive organic traffic to your website it is very important that your website is search engine friendly. When you are designing your website, you should make sure sound search engine principles are employed. You should look for a web designing company with sound SEO background so that you can have your website built on effective search engine optimization principles. Here are few useful SEO tips for web designing.

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If you have not registered your domain name already try to make your domain name keyword rich. This will help you in getting listed in the top search results faster. Domain names that have exact search terms in them will have greater chances of getting listed in the top ten results. Though this is not exactly part of SEO tip for web designing, it should not be ignored or forgotten that is why it finds its place in this article.

The next important factor to remember is that you should keep your website very light. Search engines like fast loading websites. So do not burden your website with heavy images or with huge flash files. This will  increase the loading time. Today flash elements are no more used in websites as flash files cannot be read by search engines. Moreover flash work will only slow down your website and affect search engine friendliness of the web pages.

Search engines are always keen in providing the users with the best online experience to its users. Websites that take a long time to load does not match with this goal of the search engines so they will not promote your website. Even if you are using heavy graphics in your website try to optimize all the images for web use.

Have a very clean layout. This will not only help the website users have a very good experience in your website but search engines will also be able to crawl your websites easily. Avoid using Ajax based menus as Ajax is not search engine friendly. Make use of horizontal HTML navigational menus as search engines will be able to crawl all the pages of your website easily. Fancy menus are good in terms of presentation of the website but they make your websites less search engine friendly. You should therefore learn to balance between these two factors.

When you are designing your website’s layout make sure that all the pages are accessible within two to three clicks. Search engines may not be able to access your web pages that are buried deep within. Partial indexing of websites will result in poor ranking. If you are making any content management systems for your website make sure that the URLs of the inner pages are search engine friendly. Turn on search engine friendly URL feature in your content management system.

All the URLs of the inner pages should be carefully chosen based on the content of the page. Make your URLs keyword rich and make them relevant to the landing page. You might have come across websites with URLs like index1.htm, index2.htm, index3.htm and so on. By using such URL structures you will unnecessarily lose the advantage of creating keyword rich page addresses.

When you are naming your files and images give meaningful names. Your image names too can be keyword rich. Do not choose your file names randomly. Use search engine friendly naming conventions. Avoid the use of special characters in the URLs as well as in the file names. Special characters in the file names and URLs will throw search engines off balance.

If you want to make your website URLs and your file names search engine friendly you will need to plan everything in advance and you should have already made keyword research for your website. This is where many webmasters make mistakes. They start thinking about SEO only after they complete their website design. So this should not happen in your case. Start your website’s SEO process as soon as you decide to launch your website only then you can create a website that is based on good SEO principles. Making alterations to your website at a later stage will unnecessarily increase your overall SEO expenses. Advanced planning and execution will save a lot of time, efforts and money.

Added to that, your website’s coding should comply with W3C standards. Search engines will be able to crawl your website fully only when the coding is clean. So make sure the pages are fully validated.

Another important factor that you should remember is to check for cross browser compatibility of your website. The website designed should be tested in all top browsers to ensure that it can be easily accessed without any problem. Today there are many browser types and you will get visitors from all kinds of browsers. If your website is not accessible or if it is not fully functional in all types of browsers you will lose visitors unnecessarily. So it is important to have your website tested in all the top browsers.

If you are in the process of designing your website you must take into consideration the above factors so that your website can perform well in the search engines. There is no use in having a website that does not feature in the search results or websites that do not drive any traffic. Even if you have the most expensive website on the internet, you will not be able to get any sales conversions if your website does not have top ranking. You will be forced to drive traffic through paid traffic generation methods such as PPC. To avoid all such unnecessary expenses on the long run, make sure that you get your website designed based on SEO concepts.

 

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2 Responses

  1. Punarvasu says:

    Great tips for SEO. Thanks!

  2. Millie says:

    You mention horizontal menus being good for SEO-what makes them better for indexers than vertical? I can’t see why orientation wd make a difference?

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