Page Design and Search Engine Optimization
Since you want your lovely new site design to rank well in the search engines the time to start is when you are planning your page design. Listed below are a few brief points that you might want to consider when planning your new website design.
- Make sure you consider all the browsers in use out there when you plan your site . The majority of users today are using IE 5 and IE6 but there are many new browsers and not all of them will render your site in the same way. Firefox has just come out with its first official version and reports indicate that it is being downloaded at a rate of over 2 million copies per week, so it might be a good idea to view your site in some of these browsers.
- Consider that not everyone uses the same resolution when viewing pages and that may have an effect on what they see. IMO sites should be designed to look good at 800 x 600 resolution with no scroll bar as well as at 1024 x 768.
- Consider integrating your menu system into your ranking schema. Anchor text links from the menu on every page can be very helpful to your rankings.
- Avoid if at all possible the use of frames, and Iframes. The search engines will usually have no problem indexing frames, though they sometimes do not rank them well without special treatment on your part but they simply do not even see the content of Iframes.
- Flash is a great attention grabber, but many search engines have problems when it comes to reading and indexing the Flash text content . At the present time it appears that Google is the only major search engine doing a good job of indexing and ranking flash content.
- Image maps are nice to look at but are the links are generally not seen by the search engines. Avoid them if at all possible.
- Include in every site a site map which links to every page on your site using the page title as the anchor text. (you did put unique and appropriate page titles on every page didn't you?)
- Structure your content using Header tags (<h1> etc) this will focus the attention of your reader on the topic as well as gaining a bit in the rankings.
- While there may not be such a thing as too much text on a page, a lack of text will lose you some ranking points. I like to strive for at least 240 words on the visible page.
- Some of the background mechanics that are often negelected:
- Make sure you use a DTD statement at the top of each page before the <html> tag and that it includes a URL to the defining DTD file.
- Make sure you choose a page title that is not more than about 60 characters long (shorter if you can), focuses on the keywords you are targeting on the page, and is structured to catch the eye of the reader when it is used as the title in the SERPs. If you must use your company name or URL in the title use it at the end.
- Make sure you include a meta description tag that is not longer than about 200 characters, uses your unique keywords for this page, and is structured to read as a sales message in conjunction with the page title when used in the SERPs.
- You may want to verify that your pages are compliant with the W3C standards, not because that will make the pages rank better but because it may point to mistakes that could render your pages illegible to spiders, and it will always remind you where you have forgotten to use <alt> tags on your graphics.
- When you think the page is done, spell check it before you publish it.
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