5 Tips To Design A SEO-Friendly Website

The purpose of having a website is to have an external representation and presence of your company online. Other than providing information of your business to your potential customers, website should also serve as a channel for people to enquire about products or services. If you run an e-commerce site, you want online sales. If you are providing offline products and services, you need prospects to find your website and enquire about your service.

When it comes to online marketing, search engines usually bring the most traffic to a website. The traffic from search engines is highly targeted because searchers already have the intent to find out more about your products and services when they search on search engines. Therefore, you need to get your website to be ranked high on organic search result page for keywords or key phrases that are relevant to what you are offering. This is called search engine optimization or SEO. However, most websites are not SEO-friendly which makes it impossible to get it ranks well for important keywords.

Let me highlight some of 5 important tips that your designer should follow if you want your website to rank well on search engines:

1. Search engine friendly naming conventions for all your pages. The naming convention for every page should be search engine friendly. It is best to place important keywords that you wish to optimize as your naming convention. Just make sure that it is relevant to the content of the page. Separate words by using (-) such as "search-engine-optimization.html" so as to facilitate crawling.

2. Do not build your site with Flash or frames. Websites that are built entirely on Flash or frames will prevent search engine robots from crawling the content of your site, which will be a disaster for SEO. You should not use a splash page as both search engine spiders and website visitors do not like it. Avoid using JavaScript too.

3. Remember to tag your images with keyword-rich description. For every image on your website, it has an Alt tag. You should place important keywords or key phrases inside here to describe the image. And do not place text as an image inside your website. This will prevent search engine spiders from crawling the content and will destroy all your other SEO effort.

4. Place keywords inside your Title and Meta tags. Title is the most important place to put your keywords. Most companies just put their company names in the Title tag which is not enough. Place keywords that you wish to rank well on search engines at the front of the Title and inside your Meta Description tags.

5. Have a sitemap on your website. A sitemap allows search engine spiders to follow all the links and index every pages of your website easily, which will assist your optimization process greatly.

Lastly, remember not to use images as your navigation buttons or links. If you really need to use images, do provide a text navigation links on your page so that spiders can read them.

By: Cheow Yu Yuan