If you make the mistake of over-designing your website without regard for how this design affects SEO, then you may end up with a nice-looking website with no visitors. Don’t make the mistake of trying to achieve a perfect look and ignoring search engine optimisation techniques. You need to marry both. Only when you have SEO website design can you get relevant visitors while keeping your site attractive.
Search engine optimisation companies like ours know the “art” of good SEO website design. We specialize in designing great looking sites that also promote better indexing by major search engines like Google. We have some tips:
1. Use intelligent templates. Some templates – especially those with global titles and meta tags – actually hamper SEO and do nothing to help you rank better. If you have use a template, modify it allow customization of elements like the title tag, meta tag, and other important tags individual pages. Remember: Google penalizes websites for using duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.
2. Use CSS. This technology has so much potential. CSS has definitely come a long way, and now you can make <h1> titles look cool and at the same time allow search engines to index your site much more easily.
3. Content should be accessible. Sure, a little bit of FLASH can be useful, but unfortunately, Google and other major search engines cannot read content that you put in a FLASH movie. Consider options like SWF Object so you can place alternate text versions of the content under the movie and help search engines index it.
4. Make you layout code clean and concise. The worst sites are muddles of too much scripting code. These days, it’s much better to use style sheets to make clean and concise code and highlight the most important page content on top; everything else just follows it, no matter what the layout.
