A web designer can play quite a part in helping to make a website more search engine friendly. If a web designer is very bad at his/her job then he/she may damage the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of the website. Here are ten great tips to help you optimize your website and web design.
1 – Try not to duplicate the anchor text on your links too much
A certain amount of duplication is inevitable, especially if you are linking to a main page such as your home page. But, try to avoid duplicating any links as much as you can. The web designer is responsible for navigation for the most part, and so should be wary of duplication.
2 – Use the title tag for your page title
Put your page title within a title tag, as this will inform the search engine that it is your page title. Try to add at least one keyword into the title. The web designer may be able to create a template that forces web masters to put the title between the title tags.
3 – Use H tags
These are tags that run from H1 to H6. The tags tell the search engines which snippets of your web content are important. The keywords within the H tags are viewed as more important. Ideally, you should put your subtitle into H1 tags, and then your paragraph headers in H2 tags.
4 – Keep your HTML code clean
This means you must construct your web page with well written HTML code that is not mixed with other programming languages such as JavaScript. If you need to use other types of programming code, then place the code outside of your HTML code (as an external resource/script). Keep up to date with the most recent standards and make sure you are aware of the newest Google SEO updates (such as if they start saying that the crawlers can read JavaScript).
5 – Do not use JavaScript links
These links cannot be indexed by the search engines, so you should only use a JavaScript link if you do not want your link to be indexed by the search engines. Be careful when using JavaScript links, as Google does have rules about hiding pages from the search engine crawler.
6 – Use anchor text when linking
If you are adding links to your website, you should not simply place the link on your page. You should use anchor text so that the reader may see where the link goes to. Using anchor text is a very common practice these days.
7 – Make your anchor text informative
The second worst type of anchor text is that which says, “Click Here.” The worst type of anchor text is text that is just a string of keywords. You need to give the reader some clue as to what the link will direct them towards if they click it. If you are not responsible for what words go into what sections then make it easier for the web master to insert the correct words where they should go. Do not insert a bunch of links and just label them with “Click Here.”
8 – Put keywords into your anchor text
Try to put at least one keyword into your anchor text. This cannot be done every time without it looking odd. Try to do it whenever you are linking from one page to a sub-page, i.e. not linking to a main/category page. Again, if you are not in control of content on this level then make it easier for the web master to add words into anchor text.
9 – Make sure your web page is not too heavy
A heavy page is one that has too many MB and therefore takes a little longer to load. The loading times of your web pages has an effect on the SEO of the website and so it better to keep the pages as light as possible. Obviously, you do not want to affect the usability of the site, but try to keep the pages as light as possible.
10 – Put two of your keywords in bold
Pick two keywords from your web content and put them in bold. Put the keywords or key-phrases in bold the first time they appear in your content. You do not need to put every keywords occurrence into bold; just the first time that it appears. If your web design involves adding content to this extent then using the bold technique is going to be helpful for the web pages SEO.
Author bio:
This article was written by a guest blogger Sonia J. who provides accounting homework help for students.
