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Jan
3
Is your web design search engine friendly?Is your web design search engine friendly? A website design that is search engine friendly is one of the essential components to generating traffic to your website through search engines. Your web site must be appealing to the eye of the consumer, but it must also be appealing to the ‘eye’ of the search engine. Search engines ‘read’ websites in order to find and rank the ones most appropriate for each keyword phrase entered by a potential customer. Designing a search engine friendly website is not difficult. Some of the elements you should implement in your design may even seem like plain common sense. You may be surprised, however, to learn how many people don’t follow these simple rules and create websites that search engines find difficult to read. First of all, the text should be in a simple font. The fancy cursive like scripts may look pretty, but they aren’t very easy for the eye to scan. Neither are they easy for the search engine to read. This means keeping the font basic, the color plain, and the size normal. Black, 12 point, Times New Roman, Courier, or Arial are preferred. The actual text is not where you want to draw the attention. Instead, the subject that the text conveys should be in the spotlight. Furthermore, arrange your text naturally just as you would on the page. Use proper paragraphs and bullet points as well as other devices to break up the text into bite size pieces. Take it easy when using capital letters, bold faced print, and exclamation points. Using as much text as possible (at least 250 words but no more than 750 words) will help search engines not only find you but rank you as an expert in the field and place you closer to the top of the list. Avoid flashing text and cutesy graphics at all costs to make your web design search engine friendly. Not only are they distracting and amateurish, but search engines read graphics and pictures like blank space. Blank space doesn’t boost page rankings. Make sure that every page utilizes text and specific key words associated with the product or information that you are utilizing to pull in targeted traffic. Text is the focus as far as search engines are concerned. Graphics are for the customer, and each one should sell an aspect of your product and carry meaning. But if search engine friendly design is your goal, take careful consideration of your text. Another thing to avoid in creating a web design that is search engine friendly is spam. This can show up in your site in the form of hidden text in the HTML code. Instead, make sure that your HTML code includes Meta Tags. These aren’t the big hook to catch the attention of search engines that they once were, but they do help. And every little bit adds up to a higher page ranking! Another element of search engine friendly web design and, possibly the most important, is the layout of your site. Unwieldy navigation with dead end links on your site does not just annoy the potential customer, but it confuses search engines, as well. Confusing search engines is no way to boost your rankings, your traffic, or your sales. Use a sitemap if you need to and make sure that the hierarchy of pages makes sense. Use a Google sitemap if you have a large site, and make sure that your navigation tools are concise and specific – no creative misnomers or questionable graphics. Though the elements of search engine friendly web design emphasize simplicity and therefore come across as simplistic, ignoring them will not only turn off customers but search engines as well. Make your web site search engine friendly and watch your traffic increase exponentially in no time.
Darryl Coombes – Web design & Search Engine Optimisation Tel: 021 551 0751 Fax: 086 537 3826 Cell: 071 194 2036 Email: info@webseo.co.za Web: www.webseoservices.co.za
Dec
30
How to design a search engine friendly website?How to design a search engine friendly website? Article by Namrita Chhibber A web site is a collection of data on a specific topic or subject. Web design is the designing and graphical arrangement of the content shown on the internet in the form of websites and web applications using various forms of media. Designing a website is defined as the arrangement and creation of Web pages that in turn make up a website. The web page consists of data for which the website is designed and developed. The users of internet are the actual buyers of your products and services and not the search engines. The main problem is if the website is not designed by keeping both the visitors and search engines in mind then the visitors will not be able to view the website. It’s not that, if you have spent a lot of money does not mean that there will be a number of visitors automatically visiting your site and becomes profitable. A search engine friendly Website is first and foremost user-friendly, designed and written for your human visitors first. Then the site can be twisted so that is can be easily indexed by the search engines. The phrase “search engine friendly Website” means that the Website programmer is following the rules set forth by the search engines, in order for high keyword rankings to be attained. There are few very effective approaches for designing a website which is search engine friendly: The HTML code and the website should be simple and uncomplicated to navigate.Try to create a website that contains basic HTML pages. There should be no use of JavaScript or any other dynamic design styles. JavaScript generates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search engines would crawl first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line. Allow search engine crawlers to find significant Web pages from any page.Place text links of your main Web pages at the bottom of each of your Web pages, so search engine crawlers can find you’re inside pages. Create a Site Map page with all of your Web pages listed on one page, and link to it from your homepage.The image sizes should be reducedToo many images or very large images on your Web page will slow down the loading time of your Website. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72dpi. You can also cut large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.Frames should not be used on the website anywhere.This is an HTML tag created that allows designers to display two or more Web pages at the same time. The insight is that frames can improve Website navigation, but they are browser-dependant and do not create search engine friendly Websites. Most search engines do not index framed pages. Frames only allow search engine crawlers to see 1 Webpage, when there are actually a number of web pages on a site.The website should not be entirely based on flash.Search engines cannot read Websites built as Flash movies. They cannot read text in a movie file, and also only recognize a numerous page Website for example as only 1 Web page. It is best to create separate HTML page files for your photos, graphics and content, in order to have a search engine friendly Website.Avoid the use of cookies on your Website.Allow search engines to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of engines is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in your Website not being indexed at all. There is one other thing that will stop search engines from searching the sub pages of your site is requiring cookies. Sure cookies or session ids may be essential to track visitor activity, but you can make an exception for search engines. Search engine crawlers do not like cookies. Don’t require them to accept them or they will simply leave.Each web page on your site must contain content.The web page must contain a summary paragraph of at least 250 – 500 words. The keywords should be stuffed within this text being careful of not over stuffing the keywords. Aim to please the search engines as well as your Website visitors. Namrita Chhibber is a freelance author who writes on various subjects. For more information on Website Designing, please visit: http://www.webartglobal.com/
Oct
27
How to design a search engine friendly websiteHow to design a search engine friendly website Article by Leia Mahalo One of the first questions you should ask for Search Engine Optimization is how to design a search engine friendly website. A website that is shall we say as non-friendly to search engines will lose potential traffic thus reducing visitors surfing their sites, and as far as we know such decrease in website activity will result in loss of potential sales from a potential consumer if you gear your site for selling things in the market. That is why it is also very important to build a search engine friendly website. Now in doing such thing there quite a few things you should consider. In the book “Winning the Search Engine Wars” by SearchEngineNews.com, they list 6 things to consider in how to build a search engine friendly website, they are: * Use of valid HTML and CSS codes* Avoiding as much as possible the use of Flash, Javascript, and frames* URLs should be properly used* Well and organized website and directory structure* Keep your pages as limited as possible* Proper use of what is called the “robots.txt” file HTML and CSS codes Web pages should at the very least meet the requirements of or should be in accordance with W3C guidelines. That would mean that you should close all tags which need to be closed, as well as avoiding the use of source code in which will confuse the search engine spider (yes, avoid the use of old source codes), so that your web page can be spidered and cached properly by the search engines. In order to achieve this, the code must meet the minimum requirements of functionality and successful display. Flash, Javascript, and frames Now we all know that the use of these things will be an eye-candy, or will be very pleasing to look at, thus making your site very attractive. In the other side too much use of these things will slow the computer, it will just take too long to download your website, and, as most people tend to make most of everything especially time. They just tend to cancel the page and go back to surf another site. So to build a search engine friendly website, one must avoid the use of Flash, Javascript and frames, or if it is really needed, to limit the use of it. URL Another important thing to consider in building a search engine friendly website are the URLs. Search engine spiders find and process webpages by following links from one site to another, so consider building in which they can be easily followed. Broken links as others think will degrade your rank in search results. Accessibility Consider also the use of site maps in which to organize your websites. If a page is too far deep which means the viewer has to click a few pages to open it, the search engine will have a harder time of indexing it. Thus a well and organized web structure will ensure that the search engines will process all pages in your site. File Size File size also plays a major role in building a search engine friendly website. File size with more than 100k (or 150k, depending on the search engine) will not be properly cached, so that would mean you may not appear on those search results. So the best way to overcome this is to limit the file size of your website to 100k. Robot.txt The robot.txt file is another important thing to consider as this file tells the search engine whether or not to index a page from your website. Search engine spiders process things in a limited capacity. Robot.txt helps these spiders to direct their searches for the things that you really wish for the viewer to see on your pages. The article was written by Leia Mahalo a freelance SEO and SEM specialist working for i-trepreneur.com. If you wish to contact Naomi please visit Internet Entrepreneur Blog.
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