Creating SEO Friendly Website Design
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Assembling an SEO friendly website design is not rocket science, but there is a methodical way to go about doing it. We’ve compiled a list of the most important things that a SEO friendly website design needs in order to have a solid foundation for its search engine optimization campaign. Whether you’re an amateur web designer attempting to integrate SEO into your website or a professional web designer looking to refine your approach to creating SEO friendly website design, this guide has something for everyone.
The process of creating a successful search engine optimization campaign can be compared to the construction of a new building - without a solid foundation (SEO friendly website design), the building (your website) won’t be sturdy or safe to occupy. Ultimately, the risk of the building collapsing (your website SEO campaign failing) significantly increases because of a poorly constructed foundation.
The following list, organized by importance - from most important to least important (but still important), covers all of the basic (and some of the more advanced) methods to effectively and efficiently optimize your website design for SEO:
- don’t use Flash (and how to survive if you absolutely must use it)
- don’t use frames (and how to survive if you absolutely must use them)
- the foundation of the foundation: keyword research
- researched keywords in Title and tags
- researched keywords in URL (filenames and folders)
- CSS drop down navigation (no Javascript or Flash); CSS stylesheets
- density of researched keywords in document text; don’t hide text
- researched keywords in anchor text (the text that contains a hyperlink)
- researched keywords in headings andlt;H1;H2;H3; etc.
- images (including researched keywords in ‘alt’ tags, no text in images)
