Important Factors to Consider While Designing A Website : - By Shubhankar Gautam (SEO/SMO Expert)

TeamWebInfoMart (www.webinfomart.com)

You’re probably tired of hearing it, but search engine optimization is important. It can dictate and influence who visits a site, and how many people make it through to see your beautiful design work.

It should be a part of theWEB Design & Development process from the planning stages forward. So DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS, unplug your ears and make it a priority to learn how you can start thinking about SEO in the design process. Let’s dive into the topic a little more today.

SEO Basics :­Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as just SEO, is the process of getting traffic to a website from search engines. Google is the major driver of SEO because of its popularity, but sites such as Bing, AOL and Ask are also important. It relies heavily on the overall structure of a site and keywords located in the copy and in the design architecture.

SEO factors fall into two categories: on­site SEO and off site SEO

(A) On­site SEO ranking factors include your content (quality, words, engagement and popularity), HTML (titles, descriptions and headers) and architecture (load times and speed of your site, crawl­ability and URLs).

(B) Off­site SEO ranking factors include links from other sites, social media mentions, web Participation ( FACEBOOK, TWITTER, GOOGLE+, PINTEREST, LINKEDIN etc) and basic demographics (location – country and city, history and users’ opinions of the site).

IMP FACTS ABOUT DESIGNING THE WEBSITE

DOMAIN : Always select domain related with your keywords & audience

Keywords : Utilizing your keywordsSo, you understand what your keywords are, but what do you do with them? Clearly, search engines need to be shown just what your website is all about in order to drive website traffic to you. Your selected keywords must then be considered during the website design process.Key terms must be used in:

Title Tag Keywords and meta description Navigation and menus Business slogans Your Domain Bullet points Alt text for images Graphic descriptions Title attribute in links Your primary page or product copy Internal and external links Footer links and sitemap Header Tags – H1 , H2 and H3

But don’t over optimize it! Keep in mind that SEO optimized content should be helpful, authoritative and well­written. Artificial repetition or ‘keyword spamming’ will not help you get ranking and even cause different penalties. Google working by trying to link people to the majority of relevant optimized content on the web, and significantly it attempts to link them to what they will like. So if it seems like spam to you don’t publish it.

Website Load Times :­ I mean things like: CSS files – remove unwanted/unused code or place all the code on one line per div/class. The amount of JavaScript in the code – this can be really slow depending on what you are usingit

for so I’d advise using it sparsely. Website image size – File size – remove white spaces and any unessential line breaks in code, keep it streamlined.

Design Considerations : ­ Make Sure Your Site Navigation Is Search Engine Friendly

Content and Text : ­

Content is the life force of a website, and it is what the search engines feed on. When designing a website, makes sure you take into account good structure for content (headings, paragraphs, and links).

Sites with very little content tend to struggle in the search results and, in most cases, this can be avoided if there is proper planning in the design stages. For example, don’t use images for text unless you use a CSS background image text replacement technique.

HTML and Code :

Use Unique Meta Data : ­ Page titles, descriptions, and keywords should all be different. Many times, web designers will create a template for a website and forget to change out the meta data, and what ends up happening is that several pages will use the original placeholder information. Every page should have its own set of meta data; it is just one of the things that helps search engines get a better grasp of how the structure of the website is constructed.

Place Scripts Outside of the HTML Document , see example :­

Because, Search engines view a website through what’s contained in the HTML document. JavaScript and CSS, if not externalized, can add several additional lines of code in your HTML documents that, in most cases, will be ahead of the actual content and might make crawling them slower. Search engines like to get to the content of a website as quickly as possible.

Design Your URLs for Search Friendliness , see example :­

Follow W3C Standards :­ web designers/developers have a big responsibility to stay up to date with what is going on in terms of technology and standards such as HTML5, CSS3 etc;. That doesn't mean to read every single spec out there.I no longer agree with following 100% of all the web standards because there will always be exceptions. Using good coding practices that will help developers, but that will at the same time be browser friendly. It is important to understand that HTML5, CSS3 etc; builds upon existing standards and it is made to support existing content.

Linking and Social Media : In the Website , Please implement this …!

Include Visible Social Media Buttons Integrate Social Where it Makes Sense Include Up­to­Date Buttons Include Share Buttons

Images Optimization :One more often overlooked section of SEO web development is the proper dealing with of images.

To optimize your images for fast loading times and quality, compress them to make the file sizes smaller.Go for between 30 to 120kb, with a resolution of 72dpi.

Always use the ‘alt tag’ attribute to present the search engines something different to read.

Place images in context with your page content; make sure they are related to your site or content and have appropriate titles and captions.

Put all your images in a folder called ‘images’ simply because it is sensible!

OTHER FACTS : ­1) Use 301 redirects for permanent redirects2) Use 302 redirects only for long or ugly URLs3) Put your keyword phrase in the first paragraph4) Put your keyword phrase at the top of the HTML5) Put your keyword phrase in alternative text6) Increase the font size of your keyword phrase7) Use CSS or the font tag. Apply font size changes to headline tags as well.8) Format your keyword phrases to stand out : ­ Use <strong> and <em> where appropriate to

make your keyword phrases stand out.9) If you must use frames, always use the noframes tag10) If you must use Flash, always include alternative text11) Keep your pages close to the root directory12) Use your keyword phrase in named anchors13) Use hyphens or underscores to separate words in URLs14) Don't write your content with JavaScript15) Don't have more than 10 words in your URL16) Don't use dynamic URLs17) Don't have broken links on your site18) Don't use the meta refresh tag to redirect users19) Don't violate copyright or other laws20) Don't duplicate content on your site21) Don't use robots.txt to ban large portions of your site22) Don't use frames or Don't write Flash­only sites23) Never redirect to another domain :­ Be Careful Redirecting to New Domains ­ You Could Be

Banned Since this trick is commonly used by spammers, it's a very good idea to avoid doing it. Search engines can be very hard to get back into if your site is banned by mistake.

24) Never link invisible images Or Never include invisible text on your pages25) Don't Hide Text ­ Your Site Will Be Banned : ­Search engines understand CSS and font and

background colors. They also recognize that a font­size of 1px is not going to be readable. Text that is hidden from your readers but visible to search engines is considered spam and will get your site banned.