Given below are some tips that you can make use of in designing a search engine friendly website:
1. Choosing the Domain Name
The domain name of your site is in many ways the most important. Firstly search bots give special importance to the domain name of a site and secondly visitors can get a fair idea of what they can expect on reaching your site. With the objective of search engine optimization, it becomes important to select a domain name that tally's with your most important keyword. For instance, a site that sells camcorders and has a domain name 'camcorders.com' has a huge chance of ranking higher for searches that use the term camcorders.
So selecting a domain name often plays the most important role in designed a website that is indented to rank higher.
2. Planning the layout
Planning the website design services layout is the second most important part. You must aim to design a site that has a perfect linking structure which is easy to follow and provides information in a systematic manner. Planning the entire linking structure on a canvas with proper emphasis on how to arrange information is the best possible way to begin.
3. Planning a directory structure
All sites have directories unless they are very small. It is extremely important to plan the directory structure before beginning to build the site. One thing to keep in mind is that directories that lie deep within are difficult to scan. A good directory structure consists of some important first level files followed by second level files. Deeper levels (more than two) are best avoided. One more important aspect is the aspect of naming directories. Directories should be named generally based on the files they contain. For instance a directory that contains the 'SEO' related files can be named SEO.
4. Creating and Naming Files
Files should be named based on the title tags which is often the most important keyword. Naming files in this manner helps in better search engine positioning for those niche keywords.
5. Using External CSS style sheets
Making use of external style sheets is a great idea as this reduces the overall complexity of the site. This also ensures that search engines can crawl the site more efficiently.
6. Avoiding too many nested tables
It is better to avoid too many nested tables as they can slow down the caching process. Search bots may often miss out on the most important piece of information on your web page if it uses too many nested tables. Though it may cache them eventually the delay can cost you dearly. Reducing nested tables will also help in increasing the site loading speed.
7. Avoiding Frames
Sites that use frames are extremely difficult to crawl by search bots. This is why most search bots shy away from framed sites. Using the 'noframes' tag can help in resolving this issue, but from the SEO viewpoint it is best to avoid frames altogether to secure a higher search engine ranking.
8. Optimizing dynamic Content
Major search engines like Google have the capability of caching dynamic content but they do limit caching them. This makes it difficult for dynamic pages to rank well. One way to escape from this is by optimizing dynamic URLs so they are easy to cache.
9. On page content and links
It is not advisable to keep more than 100 links on a page according to Google. It is always better to restrict the number to a maximum of fifty links. The content on a page can be anything between 200 to 1500 words. Anything more than that can be given on two separate pages.
10. Providing Site Map
Providing a Site Map is extremely important not only from the search engine point of view, but from the user's perspective as well. If your Site-map has more than hundred links, plan on breaking it up into two or three pages.
11. Balancing graphics and content
Search bots cannot read images and graphics. All they can see is plain html code. So it becomes important to reduce using too much graphics on your site. If using graphics is inevitable balance your site by adding the right amount of plain content with all your keywords.
12. Hosting your site
In order to ensure that your site is reachable to spiders at all times, make sure to select a hosting provider who offers 99% uptime guarantees. In addition also make sure that your web hosting server supports the 'If-Modified-Since HTTP header'. This will help search spiders in finding out if the site has added any new content since the last crawling. Most search bots will ignore your site in-case there are no indications of any fresh content since the last crawl.
Ed Kundahl
IdeaOverTen
