7 Tips to Designing a Search Optimized Website

SEO Friendly Design

Sound design principles are essential to having a search friendly site.  For this reason it’s critical that you make the right decisions about each design element so that you may optimize the site for search engine rankings.

A healthy trend for your website would be to have multiple sources of website traffic with the bulk coming from search engines.  So again, it can’t be overstressed as to the importance of having a solid infrastructure in place to fully optimize your website.

1. Well Written Meta Tags and Keywords

Meta Data is not visible on the websites that its used on.  Instead it web sites use meta data and meta tags to communicate with web browsers and search engines.  Examples of meta tags include the title tag, description tag, keyword tags, author tags, robots tag, and many others.  For the purposes of clarity, though, in this writing we will focus on the first three tags.

It is critical that you include relevant and unique keywords directly in the content of your website.  A well written page header title, description and keywords can help search engine crawlers understand what the page or post material is about and allows the search engines to differentiate one page on your site from the other pages or posts. Likewise, descriptive title tags help users understand what the content is about once they have landed on the page because title tags appear at the top of most of the popular web browsers.

Furthermore, using relevant keywords in your title and description tags and giving them some overlap is helpful too.  And don’t forget to also add keywords to your domain name and headings. Web crawlers enjoy crawling these areas!

2. Make Sure Your Domain Has One URL-Only

From a search engine’s perspective, if you had a single website whose url has two versions- a www and a non-www version then these are two different websites.  For example, let’s say that you have businessintelligence.me (without www) and www.businessintelligence.me (including www), then to you the website owner this is one site; however, search engines will see this as two distinct sites. For search engines every page is different and having identical content for www.businessintelligence.me and businessintelligence.me is like having two website addresses with the same content. Creating 301 redirection or permanent redirection from www.businessintelligence.me to businessintelligence.me (or vice versa) will avoid the issue of having two urls with the same content because it tells search engines which version is authoritative. Creating a 301 redirect is also likely to boost the PageRank concentration of your homepage.

3. Power Your Website’s Presentation with CSS

In the past, both the content and the presentation that most most websites displayed was built using html and html tables. However, current web standards call for a much more liberal usage of CSS. This is becoming the preferred method of developing websites today because CSS produces cleaner code and helps search engine crawlers to easily find and reach the main content of a webpage.  Another benefit of CSS pages is website loading time, since the files sizes are smaller, the page loads faster than a table based design.

4. Use a Sitemap

Site maps are useful in two ways.  First, they help search engines to find and index your site. Search engines use the information contained within a site map to know how fresh your content is, how frequently you update the site and which areas are especially relevant. Creating a sitemap will help search engines keep their index database fresh and it is easier for their crawler to follow links from a XML sitemap as all links are in one simple file.

Second, sitemaps help your users to better navigate your website by understanding the hierarchy and organization of your site.

5. Optimize Images for Maximum Searchability

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  Well then it should come as no surprise that web users are often using search engines to find images and graphics that they can then use for various functions. Optimizing your website for image search will add value in terms of search engines traffic and increase visitors to your site. The practice of using alt and titles in image tags is another way to further optimize your site. It not only provides accessibility, but helps search engines add a description to the image displayed.

6. Test Continuously

Doing A/B split testing or Multivariate testing to optimize your site for maximum performance used to require extensive in-house programming expertise or expensive 3rd party software. Thankfully, Google has provided us with a free alternative-the Google Website Optimizer.

7. Improve Web Form Structure

Web forms a way to exchange information and value; but more than that they represent conversions and bottom line for your organization. If your visitors are forces to spend to much time filling out an online form, you should offer something in return. Limit the form to only to absolutely necessary information. If your checkout process includes several steps, include a prominently visible progress indicator. And something that is often overlooked are visible points of action assurances like security logos and privacy statements within very close proximity to your call to action-do include these as many studies have indicated that they can boost conversion rates by double digit numbers.

Finally, your visitors are likely to make errors filling out your forms, so instead of flashing red error messages, write friendly and useful copy that actually helps them fill out the form without them having to do too much thinking.

Tagged As: HTML element, Meta element, Search engine optimization