Web Design and Web Development Help

Coding

Sites designed with xhtml and external css will reap rewards versus sites that are bogged down in tables and internal css. Sites designed in tables almost never use headings such as the h1, h2, h3 and lose an enormous amount of SEO benefits. Another important factor to hand coding your site is that you can code your site in the order that most benefits it SEO-wise. Meaning if your navigation is not keyword rich and you want it to be the last thing the spider reads, then code it that way.

Another important factor in having all your css in an external style sheet rather than inline with tables is that search engines base some of the ranking on Code to Content. If you have a site filled with messy code, (see example) keyword density and keyword emphasis is lost or reduced due to the enormous amount of code required.

Example:

<table width="99%" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
    <td><p class="style1">Welcome to birdhouses.com where we have a large inventory of handmade birdhouses that are sure to suit all bird lovers.</p><p class="style2"> From contemporary, victorian, farmhouse, to space age designs in all colors and sizes</p><p class="style2">Please <a href="http://www.birdhouses.com/clearance.html">shop our catalog</a> as well as our clearance page.  We know your birds will love them! </p></td>
</tr>
</table>

With all of the css linked externally, look how much less code is required which in turns increases your keyword density and improves SEO.

<h1>Welcome to birdhouses.com where we have a large inventory of handmade birdhouses that are sure to suit all bird lovers.</h1>
<p>From contemporary, victorian, farmhouse, to space age designs in all colors and sizes. </p>
<p>Please <a href="http://www.birdhouses.com/shop.html">shop our catalog</a> as well as our <a href="http://www.birdhouses.com/clearance.html">clearance page</a>. We know your birds will love them!</p>

That’s 1/3 less code for the same exact outcome.

Page Content

Writing the best, unique content for your site is the most important aspect of SEO. Yes all the other elements above and below are important, but the key to remaining highly ranked can only be achieved by writing content that educates, informs, creates humor or creates interest therefore bringing visitors back over and over again. Repeat traffic is what builds lasting SEO results.

Keywords

Using keywords and keyword phases are important SEO factors, however should only be used where it makes sense to the reader. Also consider:

• Keyword density: Density refers to the ratio of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words on a web page. The safe ratio is 2-8%.
• Keyword prominence: Prominence is how close to the beginning of an area that a keyword lies within. An example is the use of the word Victorian at the beginning of a title.

The use of <strong> for bold text and <em> for italics has little relevance but can aid in readability. Limit the amount of flash, images and videos to absolutely what is necessary since search engines require text and these elements are non-text based. Use alt tags for images, flash and videos. Again, since search engines cannot read text that is placed on images, inside flash or in videos, it’s somewhat important to use descriptive keywords in alt tags.

Duplicate content

Avoid duplicate content whenever possible. If your site has pages in both regular and print versions, consider including a no-index robot.txt to block search engines from crawling the print version. If you are an online retailer, consider having a link to your Return Policy page rather than repeat the return policy on each page. In your navigation linking strategy, link your homepage as rather than . The index.html will force the search engines to read http://birdhouses.com/index.html which is a duplicate of http://www.birdhouses.com/index.html.

Usability

An often overlooked and not talked about aspect of SEO is usability. Usability is simply the relationship between someone and in this case a website. If your website is user friendly, visitors will come back and will be crawled repeatedly by search engines. What do I mean by usable? Usable in it’s briefest definition is a site with:

• Sensible structure
• Internal links that use keywords rather than “click here”
• A site that is tested and working in the most common browsers
• Fixing broken links to external sites
• Pleasing design (ok that doesn’t matter to search engines but it does matter to humans)
• A web server that has little or no downtime.
• Page sizes small enough to load quickly so search engines can index the entire page and also will not frustrate the visitor.
• Valid Code will probably not literally help in your SEO endeavor, however it will create a better user experience and repeat visitors if the design isn’t overlapping the text!

Sitemap

The more content rich pages your site has the more visits it will incur and more weight it will hold with search engines. To make sure all pages are being indexed by search engines, use a sitemap. Other reasons sitemaps make sense is if you have dynamically created URL’s that might be problematic or if you have pages that are heavy in flash or Ajax. If you have pages that were archived and you no longer have links to them anymore, you may wish to put them in your sitemap too.

If you implement these good practices, you will be on your way to designing a well-rounded SEO site!

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