It is important that when you design your website you not only bear in mind what your website requirements are, but also what the requirements are for search engines. Best way to approach this is to remember that search engines don’t really care about how nice or complicated your graphics or flash movies are, or how snazzy your JavaScript is. Instead search engines look at the code behind your page. Therefore if you want to impress a search engine, then your code needs to be nice and easy to read. Now from this I don’t mean adding ‘comment’ tags and breaking the lines of code up with spaces, but to ensure that the elements the search engine is interested in, i.e. Title tag, Description tag, Keyword tag (these days only some search engines really use the keyword tag), Alt tag, are readable near the beginning of the code. Search Engines don’t like wadding through lines and lines of JavaScript to get to the core areas that can help you page’s ranking. Therefore careful planning and positioning of your page elements is required.

TIPS:

- If you’re using table for laying out your page then make them simple and not too complex.
- Avoid using frames.
- If you need JavaScript for navigation purposes, then use smaller scripts to call up the bulk of the JavaScript from a different file.
- Think twice on how to use graphics – make them relevant to your content and use the Alt tag for all images.
- Position the main content of the page before the images, or at least with the images nested between the texts.

Having good keywords is one of the most important areas to consider when designing a website/webpage.

One of the best tools for this is SEO Tools - Seochat.com - SEO Tools, which allows you to identify good competitive keywords for your pages.

In general the range of keywords associated to your pages can be very extensive therefore for good concentration and prominence of keywords it is advisable to carefully select the top 10-15 keywords. You can always export the results to Excel and try out other competitive keywords if the ones you selected initially do not produce any noticeable benefits.

Many search engines look at the main body of the page and identify keywords and phrases that are used within the text.

TIP: Use competitive keywords relevant to the purpose of the page within the main body of the page.

Always try and ensure that the keywords are prominent within the text body, i.e. they appear near the beginning of the page, they are defined using the ‘heading’ tag, they are typeface in bold, or they are used as hyperlinks.

This is arguably one of the most important areas of a page and needs special attention to ensure that a good title is selected.

Similar to many other areas of designing a search engine friendly page, the Page Title should also have a good keyword which describes the page content.

To keep within the limits of many search engines the number of words for the Title shouldn’t exceed nine.

Another important area to work on for good ranking is the Page Description.

This is the text found under the META Description tag and is displayed to users in the search results. Again, it is a good idea to pay attention to the use of good keywords when writing the description, which should be short (not more than 20-25 words) and sells your page before the user, has even opened it!

We have covered the use of graphics briefly above, emphasizing the importance of using an Alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s).

Although the use of images can be nice and very appealing to a website, it is also important to bear in mind that they shouldn’t overpower the textual content of your page. As a general rule of thumb it is best to stick to a 70/30 ratio (70 text/30 images).