SEO Web Design - How to Design A Search Engine Friendly Website

By Cheow Yu Yuan, January 22 2009

Having a search engine friendly website is very important to your business. When your website is search engine friendly, you can get your website to rank well for important keywords on search engines and increase the overall organic traffic to it.

Therefore, if you are thinking of building a website or you already have a website, you might want to consider making it search engine friendly. I understand that having a beautiful website is very important because you need to project a good corporate image to your clients. However, having a beautiful website often conflicts directly with having a search engine friendly site. Search engines are blind towards the visual design of your site; so in order to rank well on search engines, you need to make sure that your website has good website structure.

Let me share with you some tips to build a search engine friendly website:

1. Make sure that your website is not built on Flash technology. A website that is built on Flash technology will prevent search engines from reading the content on your site. When they are not able to read the content on your site, you do not stand a chance to rank well for important keywords.

2. Avoid using frames to build your website. Like Flash technology, frames prevent search engines from reading the content on your site and therefore you should avoid using frames to build your website at all cost.

3. Place important keywords in the Title and Meta tags of your site. You should place keywords that you intend to rank well in the Title and Meta tags of your site. Title tag should be unique on every page, and the keywords you choose to place in the tag of a page should be relevant to the content of that page. Also, avoid using auxiliary words like "a", "the", "and" in your Title tag. These words are too common, and search engines do not consider them. The impact of a TITLE tag is diluted if it includes auxiliary words. So omit auxiliary words whenever possible.

4. Ensure that the URLs of your site are search engine friendly. Some websites are built on technology that can generate pages on the fly. Although it is great for getting your site online quickly and easily, the URLs are not descriptive at all and therefore not search engine friendly. An example of a non-search engine friendly URL is as followed: "www.yoursite.com/index.php?category=1&id=1". Even though search engines can read this kind of URL, a website with search engine URL like "www.yoursite.com/services-package.html" usually perform much better when it comes to SEO.

5. Make sure that your site contains text link navigation. Some websites use images as link navigation which prevents search engines from following the links through your site and therefore will not be able to index all the pages of your website.

Having a search engine friendly website is a prerequisite of SEO. Before SEO can be implemented, you need a SEO friendly web design. Hope these tips have given you a guideline on what to look out for when you decide to revamp or create a new website for your company.

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