web design tip

Building For SEO: Web Design Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Doing web design is itself a major role and has many elements to care for, when done correctly.  However, doing just web design will not produce results – in many cases additional SEO will be needed to generate traffic to the site.  Even for a web designer that does not know detailed SEO, there are some important tips to remember for web designers.

When making a web site and wanting to utilize SEO, web design tips for search engine optimization are important to find and use. Here are 5 web design tips for SEO purposes.

  1. Keep important links as text, not images. When you link to pages inside your site, each link will add value to the page it’s linking to. However, if you use an image instead of text, then the search engines will not be able to link for specific keywords. For your main links, be sure to use text links, not image links. If you must use images, then use them as background, but keep straight “A HREF” links in place for the links themselves.
  2. Don’t overdo linking from each page. SEO for Google is based on a set amount of PageRank for each page, and that rank is distributed through each link from your pages. If you put 300 links on your page, then the rank is diluted to a tiny amount of the original PageRank. When you want to distribute good PageRank, keep your links reduced to only necessary links. If you have other links you want to use, it may be good to save them for only relevant pages, where they fit best. Putting all your links on every page will hurt your SEO.
  3. Don’t overuse Flash. While Flash can look very nice and professional, creating an entire web site out of Flash will make it an SEO nightmare. You need full content that the search engine robots can crawl, and Flash is not something that works with this. If you need to use Flash, you still can, but keep it limited to only select images. Keep in mind you’ll need text for your main links, as indicated in part 1 of this list.
  4. Keep your site construction basic and organized. You’ll want to keep each page specifically on topic for certain things. If you have four pages all covering one subject, this confuses both search engines and humans. Make sure to keep each page specific, and link to them where it makes sense. This helps to make your site easier to browse, and works for both human visitors and for the search engine robots.
  5. Target users, not just search engines. You may want good SEO for your site, but doing design purely for search engines will often hurt your rankings more than help them. Doing things like creating keywords that match the background color so that the search engines will see them but human visitors won’t – this will risk being punished by the search engines or even blacklisted, in some cases. Targeting just the search engines is often considered “black hat” SEO, and can be dangerous to your search engine rankings.

When you want good web design and also good SEO, make sure to follow these tips so that you can satisfy human visitors to your site while getting good rankings with the search engines.

About the Author

Eric G. does Tulsa website design and Tulsa SEO in addition to other internet marketing methods for businesses trying to increase their online revenue.

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • •

Filed under: Good Web Design

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!