The main aim of building a website is so that people can find your website and that you can share your content with the visitors to your site. For this to happen the search engines need to be able to crawl and index your web pages and to include your website in their search results. Spending massive amounts of money on SEO, PPC campaigns and marketing will not help if your website is not designed correctly and if the search engines can not index your site.
In this article we will be looking at some of the basic website design requirements that you need to have in place. Some of these requirements are technical in nature but we will try to keep it simple. Always remember that you need to design your website with the visitor experience in mind and that it should be user friendly. If you focus on the search engines only you may end-up with a website that provides a poor experience for your visitors and this will impact negatively on your conversion rates. Aim to keep a balance between a positive visitor experience and search engine friendly design.
Search Engine Friendly Design Requirements:
1. Make sure that your content can be indexed – Your website content should be in HTML text format in order for the search engines to be able to index it. Images, Flash files and other non-text content is not visible to the search engine spiders and they will not index this content. If you want to use images, flash or video for visual impact on your site, make sure to also include written transcripts or alt attributes that can be indexed by the spiders.
2. Use internal link structures that is easy to crawl – Search engine spiders need to be able to “see” all of the available content on your website and web pages in order to index them. It is very important that you provide a crawlable link structure through the use of internal links on every page or a site map. The search engines will not index web pages that it can not find.
3. Use your keywords in your content – Search engines aim to provide users with the most relevant information based on the search query entered. When they index your web pages they will index them according to the main keywords found and will also rank them in the search results based on these keywords. If you want the search engines to index your web pages correctly, you need to use your main keywords in your content. Effective keyword optimization is essential and you should look at using your keywords at least 3 times in the web page content. Bolding and underlining keywords are also important and the search engines allocate more importance to words or phrases that are bolded or underlined.
4. Use your main keyword in your title tag – Your main keyword should be used in your page title at least once and preferably close to the beginning.
5. Use your keywords in the alt attributes of images – When you use your keywords in the alt attribute of an image on a page it will help with web search and image search on the search engines.
6. Use your main keyword in your website URL – It is very important to include your main keyword in your website URL. This will assist with the correct indexing by search engines and will also help with your keyword ranking on the search results.
7. Do not make use of duplicate content – If the content on your web pages are similar or if you use the same paragraph on multiple pages, the search engines will penalise your website. Search engines will normally not show duplicate content and they focus on original content.
Follow the above guidelines when you design and build your website to ensure that the search engines can index your web pages. The golden rule is to design a website filled with valuable content that can entice people and to always look at adding value to the user. When you build a website that is searchable and that contains high quality and original content, people will link to it and your link building and search engine optimization campaigns will be more effective.
Check out pragmatic knowledge about forex trading online – please make sure to read the web page. The times have come when proper info is truly only one click of your mouse, use this opportunity.