Design Your Website with SEO in Mind

A common mistake of new website owners is to jump into a website design and worry about optimization later. Unfortunately, websites that are not designed with search engines in mind can be difficult--if not impossible--to optimize. If the site is truly unfriendly to search engines, it may have to be completely redesigned before it can be optimized.

Well Developed Websites Are Better

One keyword/phrase per web page is generally the rule when it comes to optimization. Especially in highly competitive industries, the entire website should be laid out, and a key phrase chosen for each page before design is commenced. Optimally, when creating each web page, its key phrase should appear:

• In the META tags (title, keyword, description).
• In ALT text of images.
• In the document name (i.e. seo-website-design.html).
• In all links pointing to the web page.
• In the 1st header of the web page.
• In the 1st sentence of the 1st paragraph.
• As 2-15% of all words on the page (some say you may have a keyword density as high as 20%).

To gain a top-rank placement for a certain key phrase, it may not be necessary to do all these things. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to do as many as you can.

Make Your Website Visible

There are certain website elements that search-engine spiders can't see, that they see poorly, or that they see and choose not to recognize.

First of all, search engines don't see pictures. Or, they do see pictures, but not in the same way that we do. What you see above is a series of computers with the text "How Many of Them Know You Are Out There?".  What a search engine sees is: <img src="images/seo-home.jpg" border="0" alt="SEO Home">.  The search engine knows there is a picture there, but it can't tell a picture of a dog from a picture of a space ship, and it can't read text in pictures. So, don't expect text in graphics to help you with your SEO.

Second, most search engines won't follow links in image maps and have difficulty following links in Flash files, Drop-Down Menus and JavaScript Pop-Ups. And since search engines find your web pages through links, you certainly don't want to hide them. If you want to include links in non-HTML elements, make sure that the files can also be found through simple text or graphic links (text links are always preferable).

Third, there are two really nasty words when it comes to web site design and SEO: Flash and Frames. Yes, you can do some amazing things with these tools, but be careful! Although search engines are getting better about what they can index, search engine spiders were designed to follow basic HTML documents. The safest thing to do is to use non-HTML elements in moderation. If you must build a website entirely in something other than HTML, you will have to use some advanced SEO optimization techniques to try to get your website ranking (and you still may not have any luck).

Keep Your Website Clean

Be sympathetic to the poor search engine spiders. If your HTML source code looks like alphabet soup, then it probably needs to be cleaned up. Remember, search engine spiders have to wade through that. If you aren't making a search engine's job easy, you aren't doing your job as an SEO.

Remember, search engines don't understand JavaScript or Style Sheets. It's best to put these in external files whenever possible. For more information about cleaning code see advanced SEO techniques.

About the Author

Sean Odom runs a Houston, Texas based SEO Consulting firm specializing in search
engine marketing and Social Media Optimization.