Many web site designers don't design their sites for the search engines. Your beautifully designed web site may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors tobeprofitable.Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly web site: Use the keyword research tool, Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to research the mostpopular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your web site.
1. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your web pages. Aim to please the search engines as well as your web site visitors.
2. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a shortsentence about the purpose of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page. 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.
3. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has purposes: search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this could help your site's rankings.
4. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site.
5. 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. Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A DOCTYPE ( “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of HTML you’re using for your web pages. [!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"]
9. Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. You now have built a profitable search engine friendly web
site.
A. 7 Web Design Tips For A Professional Looking Niche Web Site
Web site design is a critical element in niche marketing. If you want to build your reputation as a Professional in your niche, you need to project a professional image from the moment your visitors reach your web site. Your web site is the only way that visitors can judge you and your product. To avoid this happening to you, here are ten web design tips to help ensure that your niche web site projects a professional image.
Avoid distractions like Flash presentations, animated gifs and audio which loads as the page opens.
1 - Visibility - Design for a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels and a maximum page width of 760 pixels so that your web site visitors don't have to scroll from side to side to read your content.
2 - Graphics - Keep your graphics down to one or two smallish ones and optimise them to load quickly (You can optimise your graphics at www.netmechanic.com who offer a free facility to do this).
3 - Load time - Aim to have your pages load in 8-10 seconds on a 56K modem.
4 - Use CSS - CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables you to define the look of your web site with various style elements like font type, size and colour, backgrounds, Hyperlinks and a lot more. By linking your HTML pages to a Cascading Style Sheet you can reduce the amount of code on your web pages and speed up load times. "You are here >> Home > Widgets > Redwidgets" In this case Home and Widgets would be linked back to the relevant pages.
5 - Site Map - Include a Site Map on your web site listing the title of each page with a short description and a link back to the relevant page.
6 - Readability - Avoid dark backgrounds and fancy font styles, if you have a lot of stuff to read on your web pages it is better to stick to a white background with black print as that is less fatiguing to read.
7 - Test - Test your design in as many browsers as possible. For example if your site is about golf, don't include links to a dog training site (unless it's about training dogs to find lost golf balls:-).
B. Web Site Design Tips – Templates
This tip is really more for the person designing the web site than for the people who will be visiting that site. Web site design is tough enough without making things harder on ourselves. Templates are a quick and easy way to get multi page web sites done in a flash. For the most part, you can design a template and use it for every page of your site with no problem.
Designing a template is actually very simple. Most standard web pages are composed of a header, a navigation bar, and the main body of the page. For example, let's say you had a simple four page site with a main page, articles page, products page and contact page. The header might read something like "John Doe's Web Site" on each page with the minor modification of including the topic of the page in each header. The template would be the generic header and from that you would create each individual page header.
If you use individual GIF or JPEGS for your links, simply create a blank design and then fill in the page name, articles, products, etc. as you need them. This also is a great time saver. Plus, if you add pages to your site over time, you simply have to take your blank templates and add the additional page names to them. It's efficient, it's easy and it makes web site design very flexible.
1. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your web pages. Aim to please the search engines as well as your web site visitors.
2. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a shortsentence about the purpose of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page. 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.
3. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has purposes: search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this could help your site's rankings.
4. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site.
5. 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. Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A DOCTYPE ( “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of HTML you’re using for your web pages. [!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"]
9. Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. You now have built a profitable search engine friendly web
site.
A. 7 Web Design Tips For A Professional Looking Niche Web Site
Web site design is a critical element in niche marketing. If you want to build your reputation as a Professional in your niche, you need to project a professional image from the moment your visitors reach your web site. Your web site is the only way that visitors can judge you and your product. To avoid this happening to you, here are ten web design tips to help ensure that your niche web site projects a professional image.
Avoid distractions like Flash presentations, animated gifs and audio which loads as the page opens.
1 - Visibility - Design for a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels and a maximum page width of 760 pixels so that your web site visitors don't have to scroll from side to side to read your content.
2 - Graphics - Keep your graphics down to one or two smallish ones and optimise them to load quickly (You can optimise your graphics at www.netmechanic.com who offer a free facility to do this).
3 - Load time - Aim to have your pages load in 8-10 seconds on a 56K modem.
4 - Use CSS - CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables you to define the look of your web site with various style elements like font type, size and colour, backgrounds, Hyperlinks and a lot more. By linking your HTML pages to a Cascading Style Sheet you can reduce the amount of code on your web pages and speed up load times. "You are here >> Home > Widgets > Redwidgets" In this case Home and Widgets would be linked back to the relevant pages.
5 - Site Map - Include a Site Map on your web site listing the title of each page with a short description and a link back to the relevant page.
6 - Readability - Avoid dark backgrounds and fancy font styles, if you have a lot of stuff to read on your web pages it is better to stick to a white background with black print as that is less fatiguing to read.
7 - Test - Test your design in as many browsers as possible. For example if your site is about golf, don't include links to a dog training site (unless it's about training dogs to find lost golf balls:-).
B. Web Site Design Tips – Templates
This tip is really more for the person designing the web site than for the people who will be visiting that site. Web site design is tough enough without making things harder on ourselves. Templates are a quick and easy way to get multi page web sites done in a flash. For the most part, you can design a template and use it for every page of your site with no problem.
Designing a template is actually very simple. Most standard web pages are composed of a header, a navigation bar, and the main body of the page. For example, let's say you had a simple four page site with a main page, articles page, products page and contact page. The header might read something like "John Doe's Web Site" on each page with the minor modification of including the topic of the page in each header. The template would be the generic header and from that you would create each individual page header.
If you use individual GIF or JPEGS for your links, simply create a blank design and then fill in the page name, articles, products, etc. as you need them. This also is a great time saver. Plus, if you add pages to your site over time, you simply have to take your blank templates and add the additional page names to them. It's efficient, it's easy and it makes web site design very flexible.
