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WEB DESIGN & SEO TIPSThese days the importance of having a successful online presence can not be underestimated especially if your business relies on your website to sell items and services. At present there are approximately over two billion websites and growing every day. Therefore in order to make your website rank high in the search returns it’s essential that it be optimised. WEBSITE APPEARANCE v SPIDER FRIENDLINESSThese days the website design isn't so much about looks but instead it must be visible and appealing to search engine spiders. From a search engine spider’s point of view, the ideal website contains absolutely no graphic content, scripting, or tables, but instead is created purely from plain boring text. Text is considered as food for search engine spiders and as such the more text your website has the happier the spiders will be. As a result of this web designers were faced with a dilemma because the new design constraints and having to accommodate search engine spiders meant the websites looked boring and in many cases uninviting. The argument then became 'well if the spiders cannot find you then who will see the website?' As a result of this there was a noticeable decline of websites containing Flash animation and hi tech graphic content. The ideal outcome would be to make both the search engine spiders and users happy. The goods news is that this is possible, providing web designers follow certain rules when designing web pages. DOMAIN NAME & URL NAMINGOne of the most neglected and underestimated aspects is the domain name choice and page names as many search engines actually take notice of these attributes. Therefore it is a good idea to include a few choice keywords in both your domain name and web page names. For example if you had a jukebox company you may choose the domain name www.jukeboxhire.com.au, the same goes for any hyperlinks contained in your website. If you have two keywords you can separate them with either a dash or underscore. Example: Video-jukebox.htm or video_jukebx.htm. TITLE - CHOOSING THE RIGHT TITLE WORDS IS KEYSearch engine spiders pay close attention to the title section making it one of the most important sections of the website and as such should NOT BE RUSHED. As a general rule of thumb you should restrict the title to a maximum of 82 characters including spaces. Try and avoid incorporating special characters such as ‘*’ ‘,’ ‘|’ ‘:’ as they will only serve to reduce the number useful keywords that can be included. Don’t get fooled into repeating the same keywords over and over again as search engines will see your site as spam and you will be penalised. At the same time don't simply add in throw away keywords just for the sake of it. Doing so is pointless and can often have a negative affect. ie Using the example, shown above having the Title tag: 'Jukebox Hire Melbourne' or 'Karaoke Jukeboxes' is better than 'Jukebox Hire Melbourne, Karaoke Jukeboxes, speakers, audio visual hire'. META DESCRIPTIONThe next section is known as the Meta Description tag. This tag is still important especially if your website is new and as such needs to be indexed. The meta description is the same as the title tag, however instead of merely entering a list of words, you enter a short sentence outlining the services you offer. It is a good idea to incorporate your targeted keywords as part of the sentence. NAVIGATION MENU, WEBSITE CONTENT & LINKSWebsites nowadays often contain vast numbers of pages requiring many links / buttons. As a result of which, many web designers have resorted to using fancy JavaScript menus. The downside is many of them hide the actual URL's making them no longer SEO friendly. For that reason you need to make sure that whatever menu structure your website contains, the a href tag is clearly visible to the search engine spiders. In order to make your content more interesting and Search Engine Spider friendly it would be advisable to incorporate variations of the keywords throughout the menus, links and page text. For example Jukebox Hire, Hire a Jukebox, Party Jukebox Hire. It is very important that when writing the text content that you spread the keywords throughout different areas of the website document and when ever possible, use strong and h1, h2, h3 and h4 tags to make them stand out more. It is also a good idea to avoid using URLS that simply say 'Click here" or "view". Because Spiders cannot read images, it is very important to use text links rather than image links. With that being said try avoiding using images for the main navigation menus. IMAGE ALT TAGSBecause search engine spiders cannot read images means we need to attach Alt tags. These alt tags allow us to attached useful keyword information to the images which can be then read by spiders. The Alt tag is the text you see in the browser window when we pass the mouse pointer over a website image. WEBSITE TEXT CONTENTText content and structure plays the biggest role when determining the page ranking of a website and as such makes it the key factor in the optimisation process of your website. Remember to include your targeted keywords throughout the wording, but do not fall into the trap in believing that the more times your targeted keyword appears in the text content the better your site will rank! The text needs to look natural and flow when read. Bombarding the content with the same keywords over and over again will look unnatural and will be considered by Google as 'keyword stuffing' and your website could very well be penalised. CSS TECHNOLOGYUsing CSS can help reduce the number of table tags included in your website code, which in turn allows search engine spiders to analyse your website more easily, however the downside is that CSS isn't as straight forward as using tables. Also, CSS is inconsistent in different browsers which can effect the how your website appears to each user depending on the browser platform they use. ie IE 5,6,7,8 ,Mozilla Fire fox or Safari. CONCLUSIONA well designed website should not only look attractive and inviting to the user but also needs to be search engine friendly. Web designers simply need to find that even balance and buy understanding search engines and following certain rules, this goal can easily be accomplished. WEBSITE OPTIMISATION TIPS, SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY WEB DESIGNS, WEB PAGE OPTIMIZATION TIPS |
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