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It’s not enough these days to design a beautiful, functional website that addresses your clients needs. If you truly want your client to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then SEO is a necessity. Search Engine Optimization is a method of improving the visibility of a website in search engines through organic search results, and is now a viable online marketing tool for a lot of businesses.
Through the following design practices you can improve a website’s SEO and ultimately their visibility. With these foundations in place, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing the website you spent hours designing (and developing) is now a top contender for search engine visibility. You may also find some of these tactics also go far in improving user experience as well.
Keywords are an important part of any search engine optimization campaign. If you’re using the wrong keywords, search engines and your target market may never find you. It’s important when starting a website to first establish what the business objectives are. Do you want to target a local area, national or global? With this plan in place you can then build pages that target these specific keywords, or decide where these pages may go down the line once the foundation is built.
The process of creating
1. Create a list of potential keywords (i.e. words that are relevant but not overly used)
2. Input your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool (i.e. Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Wordstream, etc)
3. Finalize your keyword list based on research (Create a list of both broad and targeted keywords)
4. Prepare them for launch (typically go after 3-4 related keywords per page)
For a website to successfully integrate into Google you first must tell us what a particular page is about. It’s important to get keywords on the right position on the page, but don’t overdo it. Here are the best places:
Having Search Engine Friendly Navigation basically means creating a structure that search engines can follow. A major culprit in search engines not being able to find a website is due to the links being images instead of text. So make sure you address this and all links and buttons are text-based. CSS3 can achieve the same effects that Photoshop can, which has contributed a lot in terms of modernizing the web and speeding up load times. Wherever possible, try to avoid the use of JavaScript, as search engines find it difficult to understand and may result in crawling issues. With the push towards mobile devices supporting the web, using advanced scripting languages on your website won’t fly so well, either.
Having an SEO-friendly URL means search engines can quickly identify what a page is about. It’s also a good tactic to include keywords in the URL as this increases Search Engine visibility.
An example of a not too friendly URL:
http://www.websitestore.com/products/item1?=20193
A better, more descriptive URL would be:
http://www.websitestore.com/home/furniture/ottomans
As you can see, the second option has a better selection of rich keywords, which will help the search engine in their efforts to index you.
It’s also a good habit to name your images using descriptive keywords. An appropriate file name can be the difference between your image appearing in Google images searches or not. For instance the name “1234.jpg” isn’t going to be as successful as “midcentury-furniture.jpg” when someone is looking for design inspiration.
Perfect Website Optimization explains how to incorporate keywords into your alt tag.
Social Media should be part of your SEO strategy as building relationships and interacting with connections can help build your brand enormously. Not only that but it gives you exposure and helps build a trusted community and gain credibility.
Link building is perhaps the number one reason to jump on board the Social Media bandwagon: the process of visitors sharing links within their own network can result in a large number of inbound links. In summary, social media can provide an organization with an affordable channel that accomplishes results.
Get started by joining:
This guide by Google is a very helpful guide in learning about SEO.
55 Quick Seo Tips Even Your Mother Would Love.
Monitor where you stand with Google Toolbar and Alexa.
These are a few important ways to ensure your website reaches visibility in search engines. Although there are methods in place claiming you can reach the top spot in Google overnight, nothing is as effective as first having a solid foundation for a website in place first – the rest will fall into place. Of course, nothing can help you sell yourself as much as having a trusted, reliable product or service to begin with but with these measures ensure your online presence is seen. Take inventory of your web marketing goals and use the tools that are most appropriate to achieve the results you’re looking for.
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Saturday, May 12th, 2012 15:35
This is very useful tutorial for on-page SEO. I’ll also recommend to use tools like http://www.seoptimer.com for fast on-page SEO check.
Thursday, February 9th, 2012 13:44
Thanks for this nice post.I am really impress to your this blog post.
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 08:29
Very helpful tips indeed. Thanks for sharing :)
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Alessandro
Saturday, June 4th, 2011 12:34
Thanks for good article, and to use my website screenshot.
Good job.
Alessandro
Stephanie
Saturday, August 27th, 2011 03:51
You’re welcome, Alessandro!
Ivan Tsankov
Saturday, June 4th, 2011 13:17
Brilliant read! Helped me a lot with the alt tagand Urls (till now I had the y?=131313 things in the end) . You can benefit from Social Media if you know how to make friends. Also you can’t miss the Alexa and Google ranking, they are crucial for your site visibility.
LeeB
Monday, June 6th, 2011 18:24
Nice easy to understand article.
One comment on keywords in titles and headings – it’s beneficial to have the most important keywords/phrase at the beginning.
Michael Francis
Monday, June 6th, 2011 04:20
Great article. This helps to explain SEO to people who are NOT designers as well, and why it is as important a service as web design.
Tom Ross
Monday, June 6th, 2011 14:11
Great article Stephanie, I always need a little reminder about some of these points (especially alt tags on images!)