A well designed website is crucial to any business trying to find success online. However, no matter how well a website is designed, it is of no use if the
website does not have a good search engine ranking (which directly affects the traffic). To avoid ending up with a well designed but not search engine friendly website, you will need to implement search engine optimisation techniques to your website. While we suggest you leave all the tinkering with the codes and scripts to experienced SEO service providers, understanding the principles behind search engine optimisation can help immensely in the long run. Also, if you are building a new website, expert SEO service providers recommend that you begin optimising your site right from the designing phase for the best results. When used correctly, SEO techniques can push your website’s search engine results page (SERP) rankings right to the top.
SEO Service: Search Engine Optimisation Tips for Web Design
Here are some great SEO tips that can help you get a more search engine friendly website design as suggested by SEO service experts, without compromising on style and creativity.
- Make Your Website Navigation Search Engine Friendly: Deploying Flash for website navigation purposes can devastatingly affect your site’s search engine rankings, if you are not sure about how to make Flash items web crawler friendly. Search engine crawlers have a real hard time accessing and crawling websites using Flash, which significantly pushes the SERP rankings down. Unobtrusive JavaScript and CSS can provide almost all the special effects you want without sacrificing your page rankings.
- Place Scripts Outside the HTML Document: While coding your website, ensure that you externalise CSS and JavaScript. Search engines gauge websites through what is inside the HTML document. CSS and JavaScript, if not externalised, may add several extra lines of code to your HTML document. These additional lines are generally way ahead of the original content, which makes it tougher for search engine bots to crawl those pages.
- Use Search Engine Spider Friendly Content: As repeated often, content is the lifeblood of a website and this is what search engines feed on.
While designing a website, you must make sure the content is structured well using paragraphs, headings and links, since all this makes it easier for crawlers to index the pages. - Design Search Friendly URLs: URLs with long query strings are hard to crawl. Ideally, the best URL contains keywords that help describe the page’s content. However, you need to be careful with some content management systems (CMS) that use special codes and automatically generated numbers for page URLs. Usually a good CMS will provide you the ability to customise your URL.
- Don’t Overlook Image Alt Attributes: Ensure that all the image alt attributes are well described. All images require alt attributes to be regarded as W3C compliant. Search engines read alt attributes and may even consider them when determining the web page’s relevancy to the searched keyword.
Incorporate these search engine optimisation tips in your website to improve visibility as well as SERP rankings. However, if you feel unsure about optimising the site yourself, it is advisable that you consult an experienced SEO service provider, who can help design a more search engine friendly website. Visit us at www.GreenfieldsToolbox.com.au to know more about how we can help you.
