SEO Step By Step Guide–25. Search Engine Friendly Web Design

We hear of web design companies promoting themselves saying that they create search engine friendly websites. We also hear from SEO companies and SEO professionals that you should have a search engine friendly websites. What do they actually mean by search engine friendly website?

There are few basic factors that need to be consideration that will make your website into a search engine friendly website. One of the important factors, which we have already discussed in this series, is the URL structure. This is one of the areas that is crucial for making your website into a search engine friendly website.

Secondly, the entire coding of your website should follow the expected standards. Incomplete tags and poor coding standards can make your website unfriendly to search engines. Therefore it is not just what hits the users’ eyes that make your website search engine friendly, but it is also the codes that are at the backend matter to the search engines.

Your website should be XHML compliant. It has to be validated for errors and all the errors should be rectified at the earliest possible. When you are designing a website XHTML errors are bound to be there but you have to make it a point to validate the codes and correct the error.

Your websites should avoid Java script as much as possible as search engines do not prefer Java script. Your website should also avoid using Frames as search engine spiders have problems with crawling websites with frames.

For best results include as much text as possible including the home page; minimize the use of images. When you need to use images, use them sparingly. Remember to use appropriate names for the images and always add Alt text.

Keep the web pages light so that they can load fast. Search engines love fast loading websites. Keep all the links active; broken links and 404 errors can affect your website’s friendliness. It will also irritate the online users who often are met with page cannot be found error messages.

When you use website design templates, try to bring variation in the pages as much as possible. Include a unique title for each page. Let the site navigation be clean it helps both users as well as search engines.

Try to avoid drop down menus as much as possible. Search engine spiders find it difficult to drill down the dropdown menus used for your website’s navigation. Use regular static menus for website navigation. Use breadcrumb links in all the pages.

Use both XML sitemap for search engines and a regular HTML sitemap for the users. It helps a great deal in getting your website indexed properly.

Use reliable hosting provider so that your website has the highest uptime possible.

Try to include add fresh content to your pages as much as possible. Fresh content to search engines is like carrot to the horses.

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