A website is designed to be found by your potential customers. This makes it important to design the website to be appealing as well as search engine friendly. There is a misconception that a SEO friendly web design will not be very attractive because the designer has to make compromises. If you take care of the basic guidelines of SEO friendly web design, you don’t need to worry about the design limits.
The search engines understand only text to collect the information about your website and rank you based on that. So, every piece of information on your website should be either in the text form or supported by text. If you are using an image, an ALT tag describing the image will be sufficient for the search engines.
The basic tips for a great website with SEO friendly design which shall help you achieve good rankings are:
- Simple and relevant content – Have the content on the site simple and straightforward. Use the words in the content which people would type to reach your website. Don’t stuff the content with words for SEO as that may hamper the readability of the content. Keep the sentences shorter than 18-20 words.
- User friendly navigation- The navigation on the site should be text based and less than 3 levels deep. Each of the site pages should be accessible by at least one text link.
- Page Title – The page title is a small line of text displayed on the browser title bar. Its also the first place the search spiders crawl. Have the title text be relevant and unique for each web page.
- Meta description and keywords – The meta description and keywords provide information about the relevancy of the web page to a set of key phrases. So, use relevant and proper meta data on each web page. Again, make the meta data unique for each page so that each page is tagged for relevant key phrases in the search engines.
- Optimize images – The search engines cannot read the text embedded in images. So, make use of ALT tags for each image and make the ALT text descriptive and unique.
- Sitemap – A proper sitemap is very important both for website usability as well as SEO friendliness. Have a HTML sitemap on the website with link from each page. The HTML sitemap should contain text links to each page of the website. In addition, you can generate XML sitemaps and submit them to Google and other search engines. It tells and helps the spiders which of your pages to crawl.
- W3C Validation – Having a valid html code and valid css is important for improving accessibility of the website as well as SEO friendly. If your web page has coding errors, it may hamper the spiders to crawl your web page. Avoid using tables and frames in the html.
- Browser Compatibility – Ensure that your website is compatible with the major browsers so that the user experience is great.
- SEF URLs – The website URLs should be short and meaningful. You can use the relevant key phrase in the URL. If your website is dynamic CMS based, make sure that the URLs are static. The URLs with ? may not be readable by all search spiders.
- Inter-linking – The relevant key phrases in the content within a web page should be linked with the proper pages. This helps the search spiders to understand the hierarchy of the website structure and improves the link juice of important pages. Keep the number of links on a web page reasonable.
There are several other factors specific to a design which are important for SEO friendly website. In addition, the SEO friendliness will help bring in traffic to your website but your website should be well optimized for conversion, so that the visitors can be turned into customers.
If you are looking for a SEO friendly web design, Contact Us for a free consultation.
