Seo articles -> Build seo friendly wbsite

Many web site designers don't design their sites thinking about search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifully designed web site may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.

Here are some highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly web site:

• On primary importance is selecting the best keywords for your website and the keywords you believe your potential visitors will use to find you. Selecting the right keywords requires research.
  
  Go to the major search engines and directories. Type in the keywords you want to use. Study the source code of the web sites that appeared in the top 20. Look at how your competitors ranked in a search query. Adjust your keyword selection accordingly.
  
• Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top of each web page. Weave your keywords within this text being careful not have them so close together that your copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines as well as your web site visitors.
  
• Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page.
  
• Include Heading Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.
  
• Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has 2 purposes:
  
    1. visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
    2. search engines only spider text (not images),
        therefore this could help your site's rankings.
  
• Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi. Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.
  
• Find incoming links (backward links) - web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more to do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your web site. This means your site has a greater chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boost in its rankings.
  
  Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page. This will increase the number of links pointing to your home page.
  
• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your web site. It will also enable you to easily update your whole site should you wish to make any future changes.
  
• Try not to use Flash when possible. Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.
  
• Place any script code into external files - when using javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar) it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.
  
• Avoid using frames. Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.
  
• Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.
  
• Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. Check your html code by running it through a html validator.