Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Good SEO starts with a well built site. A site which looks the part might not necessarily be the part. Search Engines want to be able to get to the bits of content which mean something as quickly and easily as possible. the cleaner your code is the better!
1. HTML Code Compliance
A good website puts into practice of making sure HTML coding is compliant to recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard, thus making the code clean and accessible.
2. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
External CSS should be used so that the HTML code is short and it will be easy for search engines to crawl the content
3. Proper use of images and graphics
Search engines like to read text on a page, they cannot see what images are displaying. This doesn't mean images shouldnt be used (a site still needs to be made for the user, not the search engines) Instead images file sizes should be optimised to keep the filesize and loadtime of a page to a minimum.
4. Keyword Based Filenames
It is best to name a page giving relevance to what that particular page is about and/or what you want that page to rank for e.g. use:
mysite.com/cheap-broadband-companies/
5. Webpage Size
Im not talking about the length of time you can scroll down the page for :) Im talking about the actual filesize. If your webspage contains such things as large image files it may take a long time to load, resulting in visitors leaving your site before they have even seen what you have to offer
6. Create a sitemap
Even if you have a small site, a sitempa is a great idea. They provide a location where all your pages can be listed meaning it is easier for the search engine spiders to crawl each page. The sitemap shoul dbe linked to from everypage of your site to ensure the spiders can always easily get to it.
By Chris Hough, online expert and founder of www.naturalranks.co.uk