SEO Tips | Website Design Tips To Help You Rank Better

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is an important part of good website design. If you're not on the first or second page in Google, Yahoo or the like, then there's little chance that new customers/clients will find you.

However, it's very easy to get hung up on trying to please Search Engines. We frequent a few forums and online communities and at least once a week a new or established website owner will post a question on how to please Google. Infact, we've just been commenting on an Actinic thread that's prompted this article.

Your main priority is to your customer, not search engines." What?" I hear you cry, "ignore search engines are you mad?". Well that's not exactly what I'm talking about, but it's so easy to get bogged down with pleasing Search Engines that we end up with a completely unattractive webpage that's difficult to navigate.

I've put together a list of 5 tips that can be applied to new and established sites, but if you can adhere to these rules early on in web design then you won't go far wrong.

SEO Tip 1

Try and pick a URL that contains keywords that people are likely to search for. "www.backside720.co.uk" would be a cool name for a snow board shop, but I'm unlikely to search for it if looking for equipment. Where as www.snowboardandbindings.co.uk is more significant.

SEO Tip 2

Page Titles and Names should be regarded in the same way, with the most important keywords coming first. So "154cm Black Board from Burton" as a page title and "154cmBlackBoardfromBurton.html" as a page name have signifacnt keywords in, but would be better positioned like this "Snowboard Burton Board 154cm" and "Snowboard-Burton-Board-Black-154.html".

Some page names use and underscore "_" as seperators, but Google themselves say that they prefer hyphens "-".

Keep your page titles less than 70 characters long and keep the most important keywords at the front.

Remember if you change any page names to set up suitable page redirects, so that you do not loose any of the traffic you are currently getting. Also do not stuff keywords into a page title. The title will be shown in the SERPS and will be one of the first things customer read, make it concise and informative.

SEO Tip 3

Meta descriptions and keywords; like the page title, the page description will be part of the search engine result, so talk about your product and service in a short but concise manner. Entice browers onto your website to find out further information. It's documented that Search Engines use keywords to a lesser amount these days, however, if the algorithms changes they may become more important in the future, so stick them in.

Make sure that you do not duplicate page descriptions, or page content for that matter. Unique, interesting and relevant content is what you're looking for.

SEO Tip 4

A good use of your header tags is important. <h1> should be reserved for the page or section title, becasue that should be the most relevant to your page content; re-iterating, where possible the pade name and title. <h2> can then be used for sub-headings or sub-sections. Again keep the most important words to the begining of the title.

Do not use tags for large blocks of text. Search engines will be looking for important keywords to be emphasise by a heading tag, so don't confuse the issue.

SEO Tip 5

Search Engines cannot decipher images, so loads of banners and flash, while look good will not be doing you any favours without text to back them up.

Use images to draw the eye of vistors and have relevent text to support it. Use this technique when you want to create deep inbound links to other pages on your website. If you have to use and image, then make sure you include the alt tag.

SEO Conclusion

Create content saturated pages for the benift of your customer first and foremost. By doing this you'l be ticking many SEO boxes anyway. If you've done that and don't feel you getting the vistis you should be ask a layman to look at you page, get involved with an online community and look at your competitors. You should do all of these things before paying SEO specialists, they're not cheap and there are a few cowboys out there.