SEO with Web Design

Where do you start?

Generating hits to your website from the Search engines is more of a process than an individual event. The initial step is to ensure that your pages are Search Engine ready, or "Optimized" as they say in the SEO jargon. You can start this important process by checking your keywords and ensuring that you have the optimal balance in the body of your webpage(the part of the website that people actually see), and that these keywords are in your title-tag as well. The title may in fact be the single most vital part of your site to put your targeted keywords and keyword phrases. Meta tags(which people cannot see unless they look at the source code of a page), are of relatively minor relevance now, yet shouldtry to include your keywords there anyway, even though it is not a priority. When producing your 'Alt' tags for your pictures, be sure that you do not place too many keywords there because the search engines appear to be getting wise to this practice. It is extremely important to have your site correctly optimized before they are submitted to the primary search engines. Some people optimize every one of their pages for a different search engine, but I think it is probably a better idea to focus on the largest Search indexes like Google and Yahoo Search which will send the bulk of your traffic anyway. Some second tier search engines such as Ask Jeeves are simply not worth the time to optimize for in my opinion. Further, never optimize your sales page because it's main purpose is to be compelling to potential buyers. After the Title tag the most important component of your site for putting keywords is in the body. Generally, you should have around five to eight hundred words in the body of your home page. A search engine optimization method that works well is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your main keyword. Next find the ratio of keywords are in the document and then be sure your page has a similiar ratio. Optimization is so important because Just because your website is there does not automatically mean you're going to get any visitors. So your pages have to be 'robot friendly' as they say.

When designing html pages, be sparing with java scripting and particularly flash, because certain search engine have trouble reading it properly. In addition, according to one study, some internet marketers learned that having a website created with Flash decreased the response from prospects and customers by as much as 370% Whether the Search Engines recognize flash pages or not, you might decide not to use Flash regardless since many of your visitors may use slow connection and they will not necessarily be thrilled about waiting for your animated company logo to load. They may even be a tad upset about it. And then there are those who have yet to install a flash player. But If you are truly bent on using it then at try to at least provide links to other pages which have enouph text and keywords that the search engines can readily find.
You should also be somewhat wary of images when making your site map. If your site navigation employs graphic links, add text links so that search engines are able to your pages. Another thing to be wary of in your site design is frames. Generally speaking, I advise against them because of the possible negative impact appears to outweight the benefits. After you have optimized your html pages, the next step is to submit them. You can do this by going to the "Add URL" pages of each search engine you want to be added to. It is perhaps best to do this yourself as each engine has it's own specific instructions to follow. In many cases you may submit just your homepage and the rest of the website will be spidered as it follows all the links. Web directories like Jayde Online will ask for a description and possibly other data, while many search engines (like Google or Ask Jeeves) only ask for your URL or a URL plus email contact info

ALT TAG:

When adding images to your site, remember to add ALT tags because these will help for when your site gets index and also helps if ever your images go offline. This depends on what you want your atl tags to do. They could be to add keywords or to just name a image. For SEO i suggest naming it along with keywords as this can help SEO on your site too.

Image ALT tag example:


Another great SEO tool is your links they too can have ALT tags! Depending on the size of your site i would suggest that all links have ALT tags but the choice is yours.

Link ALT tag example:
 

LINKS:

When you have visited a website, have you noticed the links at the bottom of the page? If you look they are a complete copy of the links above..so why do it?

Simple it helps search engine bots find your links quicker (more so if you have drop down menus)

CSS:

Tables are in the past and DIVS are the future. It's ok to use tables for like forms or content but to build your site based on tables..well is starting to become a thing of the past and more and more people are moving towards DIVS.

So let's get right into the "thick of it"

Once you got your style sheet made up and ready to publish, ie you want to upload it to your website. I suggest you use an external stylesheet. So instead of adding it to your webpage and save google bot from reading all the lines of CSS, it will have less to read.

But i know some people would say "it takes longer to load" well that is true and false...because if you have a fast or a good web hositng it should not be a problem and should load just as fast. However, if you have tons of scripts and you run them via external then this will slow down your site as it has to load each script at a time.