Below are SEO friendly website designing tips where web designers should pay attention to during the early stage of their web designing process.

Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website. If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines.

Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.

Every page should contain the title and description tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.

Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.

Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load.

Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.

Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.

Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.
Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes.

Page Title: use a different descriptive page title for each page. Make sure your primary keyword phrases for the given page are at the beginning of the page title.

Interior Linking: when generating your inner site linking it is important to use keywords in the anchor text (anchor text is the referring text or the stuff in the blue with an underline on most links). Search engines use incoming anchor text to evaluate what a page is about.

Navigation: When possible it is important to use at least one set of text links to create effective navigation for your site.

Heading: use a keyword rich heading if possible.

Subheadings: keyword rich subheadings also help improve keyword density and make the page easier to scan.
File Naming: name the files words you want to list high in. separate the words using a – not a space or a _. This is not an issue worth changing your current pages over for, but is a quick way to add a small boost in relevancy in some engines.

Using Flash: The main thing that you need to remember is that flash text and other rich media sources are not always recognizable to search engines. When they are, they frequently offer little content to the search engines. If you must use flash make sure you add textual content to the pages.

Write For The User: Some people argue that the verbiage in the text around links is important also, and some think it is not since search engines are not theme based. Either way, focus on the user with your writing. You should try to have each page optimized, but optimizing text NEAR an outbound link to another page should not be a major priority on the current page. Writing text that reads well to users should help encourage more inbound links.

IMG ALT: use descriptive IMG ALT tags where applicable.

Bolding: bold or italicize important ideas. Also use bulleted lists to chop up text to make it easier to read and improve keyword density.

Meta Description: get a couple variations of your primary keyword phrases in your meta description tag.

Meta Keywords: place synonyms and misspellings of your keywords in a meta keywords tag. (Usually I am too lazy to make a meta keywords tag.)

Sequence Pages: when you have an FAQ section, or something similar that can be sequenced, provide a link from one page to the next such that the user does not have to go back to the FAQ page to go to each question.

Dynamic Pages: follow the tips to help list your dynamic pages in search engines.website designing gurgaon website designing gurgaon web hosting gurgaon web hosting gurgaon seo company gurgaon

Website/Functionality Questions

• Will you be updating the website on your own? (ie: using a Content Management System.)
• If you are not using a CMS, how will you be updating the site in the future?
• Do you already have a domain and host setup for your new website? If so, what is the FTP and host log in information?
• Will this be an e-commerce website? Will you be selling any products or taking payments on your website?
• If this is an e-commerce site, do you have an Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate? If you don’t, will you need help aquiring an SSL certificate?
• What is your idea completion date (website launch and go live for public viewing) for your website?
• Is there a budget you are trying to meet?

Design/Aesthetic Questions

• What are the 3 most important elements about the design of your new website? Images? Gallery feature? Prominent calls to action? White space? Rotating image or slide show? Company colors? etc.
• What are the 3 least important elements the design of your new website?
• Do you have any color preferences, existing brand colors, and/or colors you do/not wish to use? You can also provide other website URLs with colors/color palettes that you like.
• What are some of your favorite websites, include URLs? These sites do not need to be industry-related, but knowing what other sites you find appealing helps get a sense of your aesthetic.
• Is your logo and other imagery web-ready?
• Do you have all the assets/images that you would like to be included in your website? Or would you like the designer to help you acquire images – photo shoot or buying stock imagery?
• Home Page Design/Aesthetic Questions
• How do you want to draw your user into your website from the home page? What are the most important elements of your home page?
• What are the 3 things you want your user to do? (Calls to action)
• What is the goal of your home page?
• What sections does your website need (if new); are you changing your top navigation bar if you already have a site?
• What kind of interactivity would you like on your home page? For example, search function; sign up for newsletter/quote, etc.; subscribe to an RSS; etc.

Services Questions

• Do you need a photographer to help with any image assets of your products, location, facility, staff (if bios will be included on your site)?
• Do you need a copywriter? If you are using existing copy on your current website, will it need to be modified in any way? Who will be doing this?
• Whether you need a copywriter or not, if you have current copy, is this content optimized for search engines? For example, are the window/page titles, page headlines, keywords and any meta descriptions optimized for your key words?
• Will you need help determining your keywords?
• Will you need additional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help? For example, registering with search engines, adding businesses to Google Business Center, Analytic setup, etc.
• Do you anticipate needing a Site Maintenance Plan after your site is live?
  

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Client Website Discovery

The first of three articles on website discovery and what to ask your clients before starting on the design and development phase of their website.

Client’s Company

• Do you currently have a website? What is/are the URLs?
• Describe the products/services you sell?
• Who are your 3 main competitors, please include their URLs?
• What makes you stand out from your competitors? How do you differ?
• What do you like or dislike about your competitors’ websites; is there anything on their sites that you would like to emulate?
• What is the demographic of your target market or client base: age, sex, income, education, geographic region, etc.

Website/Functionality Questions

• If you have a website, do you have a site map? If you don’t already have a website, do you have a site “blue print” that includes the sections and pages of your site?
• If you have one, what do you like most about your current website?
• What are your top 3 frustrations with your current website?
• What is the goal of your website? What 3 actions would you like your user to take?
• How web- or tech-savvy is your client base or target market? 0 being the least savvy and 10 being a “power-user”.
• Do your visitors require any special technology such as a mobile version of site, multiple language support, larger type for easier reading, etc.
• Any specific features you would like included? Separate log in area for clients; calendars; forums; blog; forms; subscription services (RSS, email or newsletters); share by social networking; uploading files (documents, images, audio, video)?
• If you do not currently have a form on your site and need one, what information do you want to capture from the user? Will you be using this for email-marketing campaigns? What email-marketing service do you use or do you need to subscribe to one?

In the next article I’ll cover the second half of the discovery document and answer some of the questions.

Use keywords and key phrases in the title tags of your web pages

The most important ‘on page optimization’ techniques is the title tag. Write your title using the keywords that you are targeting. The sooner the keyword appears the better off you are. The title tag should also be kept between 60 – 90 characters in length.

Example Title Tag:

<title>Temecula Web Design, Web Hosting and SEO Services </title>

Create unique title tags for each page

This will both increase you chances of getting multiple listings for your website and gives you the opportunity to create variable but similar key phrases.

Accurately describe your web page’s content in your title tag

Doing this increases your ranking by establishing relevancy to your content, keywords and other SEO tags. Not doing this not only hurts your ranking but also can penalize you for appearing to spam or trick the search engines.

Match the title tag with the h1 and h2 tags as much as possible

Example h1 and h2 Tags:

• <h1> Temecula Web hosting Solutions</h1>
• <h1> Temecula Web Design Services</h1>
• <h2> Temecula SEO Services</h2>

Your most prominent keywords should appear in the first 100 words of your website content

Example of keywords in web page content

I am a web designer. My name is Sean Murphy and I specialize in creating dynamic web site and printed media solutions. I am a Temecula-based designer, but design for clients in San Diego, Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange County.

My clients range from law firms to wineries and the wine industry to non-profit organizations and a variety of niche products and services. I have successfully launched web sites with custom designs and integrated SEO best practices to optimize client search engine ranking

Keyword repetition and density

Although search engines do not measure keyword density, repeating keywords the right amount of times will help increase you ranking. Be very careful though, too much repetition and your website can be labeled as spam. Alternatively, too little keyword repetition and you may loose significant SEO Ranking.

Use strong or em along with bullet points

Emphasizing text with Strong or em is a great idea. You can highlight the keyword or whole sentence containing keywords. Research has shown that italic usually works better than bold. Mainly because people know bold influenced the search engines and abused its use.

The use of images and ALT text

All images can have a distinct filename and “alt” attribute, both of which you should take
advantage of. The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. This alternative tag gives you the opportunity to reiterate your keywords but only if it’s both short and descriptive of the image.

Example Alt Tag

<img src=””linux-server.jpg”” alt=””Linux web hosting server” />

Beware, making your Alt tags too long, keyword heavy or repetitive can produce the opposite effect by being labeled as spam by search engines.

In my next article:

I’ll cover anchor text, page descriptions and social media to increase page rank and SEO.

If you are designing a website or working on copy for a site you’ve already designed, the content of the web site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO). The pages you create should provide valuable information that reference specific ‘keywords’ and ‘key phrases’ that are unique to your business and target market.

In most cases coming up with unique information can prove to be a challenge since you’re competing with numerous other websites attempting to do the same thing. I’ve found that creating geographic key words and phrases, specific to the region you’re marketing can eliminate much of the competition.

Example:

General key phrases:

web design, web hosting, SEO

Geographic key phrases:

Temecula web design, San Diego web hosting, Orange County SEO

By adding specific regions (city, county, state) you narrow both your target market and competition, increasing your search engine ranking and your chances of a successful ‘click through’ conversion. This obviously doesn’t work with every business module. If you offer services/products globally you’ll need to change your strategy somewhat and may want to consider breaking your web site into regional markets or segments.

A few SEO Resources

Google Analytics -Free analytics tool from Google
SEO for Firefox -Provides easy access SEO data
Website Grader -Free website grading tool/ competing website analysis.

In next weeks article

I’ll discuss page structure as it relates to SEO