SEO Friendly Web Design

Nowadays the Internet marketing gets bigger and bigger share from the budget of the marketing departments. In my opinion, the best opportunity in the online promotion is that it let you to compete effectively with much bigger and stronger companies in order to gain the confidence of the potential customers. You need to to grab this!

With the following guide i would like to help you a little to compete more succesfull with your new website or to transform an existing one to make it much more powerful in the online search engine marketing arena.

Content
Firstly, i would talk a little about the content. It is very easy to write effective content for search engines [i know it because i have done it many times] but i doubt that your products are aimed at crawling robots.
No matters whether your site is profit oriented or you want the visitors to sign up for your newsletter or you simply want to provide them some entertaining online, you certainly must have an aim. You need to build up and structure of the content keeping in your mind your ultimate aim.
Using the different keyword tool such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool or the DP Keyword Generator you may select those words or expressions, which may drive you organic traffic through search engine results.
You need to lead the visitors using the sentences and pictures to make them do what you want them to do. Don’t worry about the keyword density; this is not an issue anymore. Write convincing and enjoying natural content, structuring clearly using headings [<h1> ....<h3>]. Once you are ready, test it with as many people as you can.

Search engine optimisation is mainly composed of keyword research and positioning your website and web pages with [external and internal] links and the <title> tags. I will deal with the links a little bit later, but at this point you need to remember that you must write expressive, short and keyword rich unique title tag for every single inner page. This is an effective way to diversify your keyword basket.

One of the best feedbacks about the quality of the content beside the selling volume can be the “number of downloaded pages/ visit” statistic ratio. You may get this data using almost every web tracker service [Google Analytics, Statcounter etc.]. You must try to maximize this value and don’t forget your aim.

Internal navigation links structure
The external links from different domains; the internal links are one of the best way to position your content. Using the results of the keyword research as anchor texts of the internal link you can increase the relevancy for certain keywords or keyphrases concerning your main page as well. Avoid using JavaScript based menu, spiders of the major search engines can’t follow JavaScript based navigation links. The best solution is plain text link based menu. I would like to warm you again not to forget your aim, you can improve navigation for your visitors by using breadcrumbs .

If content at a given page is vertically long, you may want to make the navigation faster [reducing scrolling] for your visitors using quick links. You can implement quick links with the simple code below:

In the html code of the links you define where you want to make the reader jump [<a href="#location" mce_href="#location">anchor text of the quick link</a>] and at the desired part of the page you need to insert this code <a href=”location” mce_href=”location”>desired point</a>. For live demo please visit this page. I’m sure the visitors will like it, and if your visitors like your site the search engines will do so as well.

Site map page
Make sure that you create a site map for your visitors. Besides helping them navigate among the valuable content it helps the PageRank flow and make possible to transform your pages structure much flatter. I saw many website which has more than 5 horizontal level, and it is not the luckiest way to fascinate search engines. So you may use the sitemap page to point pages, which can be found in deeper structure level. Please keep in mind that according to the Google recommendation you shouldn’t place more than 100 links at a given webpage, so if the sitemap page would contain more links, place them at different pages.
Hyphenated URLs
Observed and easy to prove that search engines can’t recognise the keywords in the URL if you separate them with underlines. Many effective ways exist to show those words properly for the robots, but the most elegant is the hypens in my opinion. After the keyword research you should have many phrases, which you would like to place in the title tags and do the same concerning the URLs. Search engines really like the keyword rich web addresses, so use the cleverly, separating them with hypens.

Frequent design mistakes
I’ve seen so many websites where i found the “/index.php” as the main page link location instead of “/”. Search engines don’t know that this is the same location so they calculate the relevancy and importance of this locations separatly. If your hosting provider enabled the mod_rewrite possibility you can easily correct this mistake uploading the following. htaccess file to root location on your server.

<code>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]
</code>
Depending on the used file extension the php may be substituted by html as well.

Google algorithm treats the www and the non www version of your domain separatly unless you show for it that they belong to the same domain. Firstly you need to choose which one you would like to use. Best way to select is visiting the Yahoo! Site Explorer service and after checking the results of the linkdomain:yourdomain.tld and linkdomain:www.yourdomain.tld queries you will see which one is more popular subdomain.

If you would like to use the yourdomain.tld you need to place this code into the .htaccess file
<code>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http:// yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</code>

If the linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com query had more results you need to use this code
<code>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com # /$1 [L,R=301
</code>

Boosting the loading time
Beside designing website using <div> instead of tables and placing every javascript and style information codes into external js. And css files will improve the speed of your site and transform the code much professional

I wish you best luck to you all, and happy SERP checking for every day!
Post written by Bagi Zoltán
Webmaster of the directory of seo links

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