Mitash SEO, e-Commerce, Shopping Cart, Web Design & Development Blog

A well-designed search engine friendly website can go a long way in improving user experience and advancing your profitability. By focusing on facilitating a pleasant online user experience, you enable users to accomplish their goals and greatly improve your chances of retaining them as satisfied customers. The internet is replete with websites that cannot be indexed owing to poor design choice, poor url structure and back-end programming.

While it is essential for your website to be visually appealing, it is even more important for it to be search-engine friendly. Let us explore visitor and search engine friendly design tips that you can incorporate while creating websites.

Unique IP address

Every website must have a unique IP address. However, if your website is hosted on a shared platform, ensure that you have a unique IP address. Most search engines block websites that try to manipulate rankings. Thus if your website is hosted on a shared server that utilizes a single IP address for all websites on that server and a website using that address is blocked, then your website will be blocked as well.

URL keywords

Your webpage names should reflect the content of the page. You must keep page names within a reasonable length and avoid using special characters unless they form part of your keyword. URLs are a great place to showcase keywords. If you utilize a sub domain structure, sub domain names should also reflect your selected keywords.

Graphic relevance

Effective website designs balance HTML-formatted text and graphic images. Be prudent about how you use graphics. Ensure that they are relevant to your content and insert an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to understand, as they cannot read graphics. Do the same for your visitors, so that they can view something while waiting for the graphics to load.

Standard software use

Create the website using standard HTML. As software like FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will add unnecessary scripting codes enlarging the page size, making it difficult for search engines to crawl. At times such software adds codes that are unreadable by search engines, resulting in the website not getting indexed. In case you need to use these web page creator software, exercise discretion and manually avoid or delete unnecessary scripting codes.

Ensure quick downloads

It is important to make use of external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files in order to reduce the page size and quicken the download time. This will enable search engines to index your web page faster as well as improve your rankings.

Don’t get framed

Avoid using frames as major search engines don’t list websites that utilize frames. Try creating standard HTML non-frame companion pages that are search engine friendly. Also, input relevant text containing keywords on your FRAMESET page between NOFRAME tags for search engines to parse. It isn’t uncommon for search engines that index frame websites to link to individual, non-relevant frames. To avoid displaying individual frames, provide JS in each frame to call the parent frame when a child frame is selected. For instance, if (top == self) self.location.href = “default.asp”;)

Link back

Ensure that every page on your website links back to your homepage. Several search engines estimate pages based on the depth level within the website. Root-level pages are considered more relevant to the website by search engines than pages in subsequent levels. Create a site map page to help search engines find your content and post a link to it on your home page. Dynamic websites that don’t hardcode page links should always provide a site map.

Link colours

In general search engines read tags and are not bothered by what colour you use to define the link unless you create a transparent user link. This means that the colour used for the link is the same as the background colour. Most search engines are equipped to recognize a transparent link and will lower your page ranking for their use. So be careful not to use transparent link colours.

Customer focus

Websites must be created with designs and words that your target audience types into search queries. As meeting the target audience needs is the main reason for the origin of your website in the first place. The needs could be varied: branding, direct sales, customer retention, trust, communication and online visibility. Your site must gain the user’s trust and be persuasive enough to address those needs.

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