How to Design a Search Engine Friendly Web Site

Many web site designers don't design their sites for thesearch engines. This is a huge mistake because they missout on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifullydesigned web site may have cost you thousands of dollarsbut it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.

Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing asearch engine friendly web site:

1. Research highly targeted keywords - do this even beforeyou begin designing otherwise you may have to go back andclean up some of your web site design. Use the keywordresearch tool, Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to researchthe most popular keywords that pertain to the subjectmatter of your web site. Wordtracker will show how manypeople have searched for that particular keyword overseveral search engines within the last 60 days.

2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keywordphrases that you can include within your web pages. Afterhaving completed the above research, you should have foundthe keywords that were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small number of competing web sites.

3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the topof each web page. Weave your keywords within this textbeing careful not have them so close together that yourcopy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please thesearch engines as well as your web site visitors.

4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags arethe title and description meta tags. The keyword meta taghas lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it,however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page.

5. Include Heading Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separateeach section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you shouldinclude the keyword phrases placed in the same order asyour keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.

6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a shortdescription for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has2 purposes:

a) visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore thiscould help your site's rankings.

7. Reduce image size - too many images or very large imageson your web page will slow down the loading time of yourweb site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi.Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphicseditor.

8. Find incoming links (backward links) - web sites thatlink to yours raise your link popularity. Search for websites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or moreto do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your web site. This means your site has a greater chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boostin its rankings.

Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com)from all your internal pages to your home page. This willincrease the number of links pointing to your home page.

9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a cleandesign throughout your web site. This will reduce the timeto implement a consistent text (or layout) style for yourweb site. It will also enable you to easily update yourwhole site should you wish to make any future changes.

10. Place any script code into external files - when usingjavascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar)it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushingdown the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.

11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. ADOCTYPE ( "document type declaration") informs thevalidator which version of HTML you're using for your webpages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages:your markup and CSS won't validate without them. i.e.

[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"]

DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering andfunctioning of web documents in compliant browsers likeMozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

12. Write clean html code - web site editors often writeextra code. This can increase the loading time of your webpages. Check your html code by running it through a htmlvalidator (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator).

Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submityour site to the search engines and get ready for lots oftargeted traffic.

You now have built a profitable search engine friendly website.

Resources

The Global Structure of an HTML Document
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.1

Page Validation and Loading Times
http://stoco.net/cgi-bin/wc/wc.pl

Fix HTML code errors
http://www.netmechanic.com

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com AffordableWeb Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles at:subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of hisin-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles