Making your website SEO friendly

Search Engine crawling bots these days are prepared with numerous difficult algorithms that help them differentiate between a sincerely related website from one that is shouting out all the related search keywords. Search Engine Optimization is no top-secret and is generally understood and grasped by the engineers at Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. They regularly upgrade their algorithms to cut out needless websites that spend a lot of amount on Search Engine Optimization but don’t appear in Search results pages. But, with some contrary work and common sense, we can find out ways to design a new website keeping a few guidelines and tips in mind and unaffectedly pass the search engine bot filters without being identified for extreme keyword spam and get the maximum out of SEO.

1. Keywords

Keyword research is the first thing to do and tools such as Google AdWords keyword tool, Market Samurai, Moz etc can prove to be of immense help. The Google instant search box gives auto completed phrases/keywords that the world is looking for and this should be taken into account when deciding keywords and terms to be used on your website.

Another important thing to understand, and probably to exploit the most out of, is the search algorithms themselves. Design your website to include as much content as possible to show relevance. Content here meaning:

Title Tag

Meta description

Navigation and menus

Domain

Alt text for images

Footer links and sitemap

Header tags - H1, H2 and H3

All of the above should point towards/contain relevant keywords helping the search bot decipher and make sense of what your product/business website is all about. Google Analytics can help monitor web traffic and thus update your content to be more relevant, authoritative and well-written.

2.  Navigation menus

The website navigation should cater to both the users and the search engine bots. Sometimes, to give a more advanced GUI look, web designers try to replace buttons, menus with images. However, this is very hard for the bots to decipher because of it not being in a text format. Instead, CSS should be used for the same GUI effects and the associated text links can help the search bots 'crawl' your website content with ease and tag sections for relevance.

3. URLs and filenames:

A badly named domain name or URL might be difficult for users to remember. Also, search bots would have difficulty understanding the URLs and link them to your content and thus will rank you lower on the relevance test.

Similar rules apply to filenames, be it for images or for a sub-directory. If the search bots can understand and attach more relevance and have a better selection of keywords helping the search engines, it will help their efforts to index the website contents better.

4. Images:

Here are some tips to maintain images that appear on your website:

• Compress images to make them smaller while optimizing for quality. This enables fast webpage loading times.

• Use the 'alt text' attribute for each image to enable search bots to understand what the image stands for. This adds more information that the search bots can 'crawl' and thus adds more relevance to the content of the webpage. This also helps web browsers to show alternate text in places where images failed/ took long times to load.

• Instead of placing images that appear on individual web pages in the same directory as the web page itself, keep all the images in a single folder, perhaps named 'Images'. This aids for easy site maintenance and upgrades.

5. Social Networking on your webpage:

Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Digg, LinkedIn are the most popular social networking sites out there. Nowadays, they are so tightly integrated to cater to the business needs that status updates or blog posts about your business can draw and increase web traffic to your website multifold. It is therefore essential to have social networking plug-ins embedded on the websites to point website visitors towards your profiles on those networks and subsequently connect with each one of them.

Your efforts put into creating an attractive and impressive website would prove futile if search-engines cannot read/index it. Keeping in mind the above mentioned tips, you can contact the Website Designing and Website Development services provider for designing a SEO-friendly website .