SEO In Web Site Design

If you are looking to generate free or organic web site traffic with your upcoming web site, then there are several things to consider when creating a design plan.

First you need to ask how many images are you going to add and how much space will you have available for content? Most people want a site that is pleasing to the eye and will keep the visitor entertained with the so called eye candy. You can accomplish this without going overboard.

Just a few years ago, web designers were creating sites completely in Flash format. The sites looked great and were fun to surf but were not indexed by search engines. You can have Flash movies and other scripts that add enjoyment to the site and not compromise your sites optimization for the major engines.

For every page you want to have crawled and indexed by search engine spiders, you need to have enough readable content on the page with keywords specific to your site embedded. This will allow the search engines to index your page content.

Your main content should be above the area called the fold in the page; this is where the web page drops off the bottom of your screen before scrolling down. There has been much rumor that when the search engine spider crawls the site it travels so far down looking for relevant information to match with your heading meta tags, if the information is not found it will go to the next page and your page will not be indexed correctly.

Make sure the heading met tag title, description, and keywords are relevant to the content on the page and to your specific industry. Do a search on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for specific keywords in your industry and see who comes up in the top of the free listings.
Click the view, page source in your browser window and you will see the met tags they use. Compare the 3 different search engine listings and use ideas from each. See how each website has their content laid out and that you can find the meta tag keywords in the page content.

Site navigation is crucial in web site planning. All pages should link to each other and there should be no broken links. Text links give search engine spiders an easy way to get from page to page so use them when ever possible. Many sites are built using PHP and ASP scripts and the navigation links are not found by the spiders.

If you have asp or psp navigation links, create an html site map. There are many free site map generation tools available today. Place this link on every page and you are sure to have all your important pages indexed.

The key to a great web site is quality design layout and great content that is updated often. Rotate banner ads and post newsletters to keep you content fresh. This will keep the search engine spiders coming back for more.

For more information on web design and search engine optimization visit Web Solutions of America.

Shawn M Hickman
Internet Marketing Manager
Web Solutions of America