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Designing a Website with SEO in Mind

SEO = Search Engine Optimization or in other words getting your site to rank higher in Google.

When you are attracting customers to your website, it’s imperative to understand how to effectively design your site using SEO (search engine optimization). You need to understand how a search engine operates. Search engines are very limited in how they move through the internet. Search engines see things a lot different than you or I. Here are a few things you need to know to have your site bringing in the customers using SEO.

Most of the content of your website should be in HTML format. Search engines will often ignore flash files, images, Java applets or other content that is non-text. You will need to focus on the keywords or phrases your customers are most likely to put in the search box and make sure they are in HTML text in your pages. If you have a number of images and other types of content, substitute them for text or add text describing the content.

Other problems a website designer should avoid is having no structural links to various pages. Web browsers need to see the links to your pages. Sure, the search engine can see the page that contains the keywords, but what about the rest of your website content? Make sure to link them to direct customers to everything on your site.

Keywords are the main way to bring someone to your website. In designing your site to be SEO friendly, you will have to be accurate and concise in thinking about the keywords being used. You don’t want the content on your web pages to be too wordy or vague just to draw someone in. In this “instant” age we live in, people aren’t going to spend much time trying to figure out what product or service you are offering if they can’t find it right away. They will move on to the next website.

The best way to find out how a potential customer sees your website is to go there yourself. Type in keywords and phrases and see where it takes you. Look at what a potential customer sees. Does it look like how you pictured it? Is this the impression you were hoping for? Does all the information on the website come across as informative and accessible? If not, perhaps it’s time to redesign it. Get together with your programmers and designers and tweak it. You want the customers brought to you by SEO to become a customer and not move on to the next site on the list.