Best 10 Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Design

E Marketers are aware of the value of getting top search engine rankings and listing in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN .So, they spend most of the time in website content optimization, getting inbound links, and title tag and Meta Tags optimization. But, What about web design? Many of us close the eyes to the fact that web design structure plays a vital role in search engine optimization (SEO). For optimizing a website, we must ensure that it should have a search engine friendly web design structure.

This article deals with several value added and important search engine friendly techniques to be considered while designing a website.

HTML Code Compliance:

A best web design put into practice of making sure HTML coding is compliant to recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard (validator.w3.org). By this we can get a clean code structure were search engine spiders can easily get into the contents and index for top results.

Proper Usage of Images and Graphics:

Images file size should be optimized and as search engines are fond of reading text rather than image, so we should avoid use of large images on top of the website where ever it is possible.

Cascading style sheet (CSS ):

Web design best practice includes CSS since it can regulate the look and feel of the website and clean code. Internal CSS is not a good practice since it increases the code size. External CSS should be used so that the HTML code is short and it will be easy for search engines to crawl the content.

Content Management Software (CMS):

Search engine friendly CMS plays a vital role; if you make use of CMS to manage the website, make sure that the CMS allow

Defining different template for different pages gives the flexibility in website content optimization.

CMS should provide a provision for adding unique Title and Meta tags for web pages.

CMS should generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic URL with stop characters. Search engine hate dynamic pages with stop characters (ID passing page). By many search engine algorithm, they do not index dynamic URL more than 2 parameters with in the URL.

With out getting indexed in search engines, the page will not be ranked and it’s a waste of using the page for web promotion.

Multiple-level Navigation Menu:

Most of the sites use multi level navigation menu using JavaScript code in the HTML body, this is a bad idea when considering search engine optimization. It is recommended to have a separate JavaScript from HTML by using external JavaScript file in folders called includes. This external JavaScript file can be called in HTML coding which gives a clear code in HTML and it is easy for search engines to index the contents.

Web page size:

Page size is an important aspect while optimizing the site, try keeping the page size less than 50 KB and the page should not take loading time for more than 7 sec to download.

ALT tag:

One of the important tag is ALT Tag, it should be added to all images related to the content, it helps in both ways for search engines and for the case when the connection is slow the alt tag appears before the image get load.

Bad Web Design:

There are two important things to considered while designing a site for search engine friendliness, like avoiding use of frame and redirections

Using fames is a bad idea, you can define or show only one web pages and it is hard for search engine to index content in the frameset. Although they index frame pages, there will not be any option for more web pages index.

In some occasions web designers make some re-direct pages by using JavaScript re-directs techniques or by Meta refresh, it re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Search engine spammers use these techniques but this could penalize your website by search engines.

Flash Movie Website:

Flash movie or a Flash intro in your website should not be added as default page, when designing a web site considering SEO, it is a waste using complete flash on loading default page. For Search engines, flash are like a graphic and it cannot index content within a flash movie file. Complete flash movie website is hard to get top search engine ranking. If you are so keen in appeal, try using flash intro inside the default HTML page or maintain two version one as Flash and other as HTML.

File Directory Structure:

The web page structure is important, if the web page is too deep from the root folder the crawler may not go deeper and find it bit difficult to index, unless and until we promote those page through link promotion. It is better to avoid more than two levels from root folder.

Hope this article would have given a better idea of search engine friendly web design.To write us about your comments and feedback about this article contact us, also click here for our web and flash templates.