SEO Web Design

Professional SEO Web Design begins with identifying your target market, keywords and online competition. Once a sound search engine optimization strategy has been developed, a look and feel that demonstrates the best position of your business can be created.

A complete SEO campaign should encompass an understanding of the target market, keywords and competition; first page search engine rankings for exposure across hundreds of high volume keywords and conversion optimization through using compelling conversion funnels to capitalize on traffic after they arrive.

What good is a great site, if nobody can find it on the web?

When designing an SEO Website, the following tips should be kept in mind:
The following are general recommendations for designing a search engine friendly website through practical design, standards-based coding, and concentrated content development that will result in maximizing exposure in the search engines. These recommendations are not presented in any order and apply to any website. For best results they should be considered as a whole.

Separate your web page design and your HTML. To make it easier for the search engine spiders to index the content your users see, write standards-based XHTML for structure and implement external CSS for design layout.

Write unique and meaningful HTML titles. Use keywords to accurately describe the content of each web page. You may also want to consider the order of the keywords in the page title. If your brand is already well established, you may want to consider placing industry keywords before the name of your company name. Google currently displays roughly the first 60 - 65 characters of HTML titles.

Provide unique and meaningful page descriptions. Meta descriptions should be used for all web pages made available to the search engines. Think of these descriptions as brief summaries of the pages content that are more or less 150 characters or less.

Ensure JavaScript is search engine friendly. Use Javascript with caution and ensure that the spiders are able to index any JavaScript-driven content. If your navigation uses JavaScript, you may want to consider using a text version of your navigation as a footer element.
Create an external file(s) for JavaScript. Web page indexing efficiency can be improved by reducing the JavaScript between the head tags.

Only use Flash as a design enhancement. Avoid using Flash to create your entire website or to create site wide navigation. Flash is best used to add interest to specific web pages like you would other imagery.

Avoid the use of splash pages. Take the time to create an eye catching home page with thoughtfully written, user friendly content that provides links to your site's most important web pages.

Do not use frames.

Create a site map. Place a link to your site map on every page of your site. This provides a fast and easy access to your website’s most important internal links to the search engine spiders.
Use descriptive link text. Avoid using generic link text such as “click here” or “read more” and opt instead for more descriptive text like ”learn more about seo web design”.

Use ALT descriptions. Search engine crawlers do index text contained in your image ALT descriptions. Make sure you keep them short but thoughtful and descriptive.

Create search engine friendly URLs. If necessary use URL rewriting scripts. Search engines have difficulty indexing dynamic urls that consist of complex query strings.