Web Design and Search Engine Optimization Best Practices

These issues can be tackled by putting certain search engine optimization (SEO) measures in place in order to optimize your website.

For example, if your web design revolves around Flash or Frames technologies, then search spider engines may find it difficult to navigate or index your pages. This causes low ranking.

It would be best to completely avoid using Flash or Frames, but this may simply not be practical for you to apply, so we would like to offer you some possible solutions to work around this.

You ought to avoid developing your sites entirely in Flash, although this may not be possible. In this case, you could create a version in HTML which can be indexed easily by the search engine bots. Another possible alternative would be to develop particular elements, like menus and banners, for example in Flash; using HTML to maintain the text content.

You will find that websites using Frames usually only have one visible URL. This results in the search engine bot only ever recognizing one page, however many pages of content are viewed by the visitor. More often than not, it is the just the homepage that is recognized. This could result in all your interior pages never getting cached or properly indexed. An SEO solution for this could be to break the website out of its framing code, or you could add a tag – inserting your content (keyword rich) in between.

Search engine bots frequently have difficulties in indexing pages that use a version of dynamic URLs and session ids. This is particularly true if the session id string is considerably long. Implementing a mod rewrite ensures that your URLs become more search engine friendly. Keywords written in the URLs can give your web page a boost in rankings.

Search engine bots ignore, or do not read codes such as Javascript on websites that use maps or image links during navigation, even though the visitor to the website can browse and read each page without any problems. A text link sitemap, which links to each webpage, will provide bots with a means to travel to every page without any problems.

A webmaster may be baffled as to why his website is hardly ever produces any targeted traffic that is on topic. The problem here lies in not choosing the correct keywords and you can check what words your targeted audience is tapping into the keyboard and what they are subsequently searching for by conducting your own research into keywords.

All search engine bots “see” in the textual content of your website, is an image. They do not read the textual content in the same way as us humans do, so don’t worry about your web design in this context by choosing fancy fonts. Picking plain fonts will actually do more justice to your keyword rich content.

The next step in SEO is to incorporate your well-researched and developed keywords into original, well written content. The dangers of copying and pasting from another site is that you will more than likely be penalized with duplicate content and your web site’s rankings will be effected. Likewise, keyword spamming also leads to penalization, so try not to overdo the amount of times you use your keywords throughout your document.

The title tag is vital to on-site optimization. Try to avoid stuffing keywords into the title tag and be sure to use proper keywords. For best results, ensure the character count does not exceed 65.

Although keyword meta tags are no longer read by Google, they continue to be read by small search engines, so you don’t have anything to lose by inserting a number of keywords here. Remember that the description tags will appear in the description of your rankings site, so they should be simple, effective and short. Be sure to label each image on your web page with It is a good idea to use Alt tags to label the images on your web page wherever you can and remember to avoid keyword spamming or stuffing as usual.

The best way to increase your ranking is to include your chosen keyword in the anchor text. You can try this out by exchanging links with some other high quality, family friendly and on-topic web sites, for example.