SEO Web Design Tips for Creating SEO Friendly Web Design!

 The elements that contribute to an effective web design, although subjective in nature, have been tried and tested, repeatedly. Whether for an ecommerce website or a local business website, the best practices of web design center on a consistent layout with cohesive typography, color schemes, and overall usability.

Not only does logical use of these elements make a site look better, but they can also impact conversion rate potential, which is a big +1 for SEO. The foundation to any online business is its website. Ensure the elements of your company's web design are cohesive and conversion-effective by absorbing our infographic below. Cheers.

There are a lot of theories and popularized beliefs out there on search engine optimization. SEO has become more and more of a delicate balancing act in finding the most effective way to rank. Below I will briefly detail successful strategies dedicated to the ever-almighty task of ranking high on search engines.

However, before I begin, it’s wise to touch on a few factors which need to be ironed-out in order for these strategies to work properly.

Accessibility - Search engines need to be able to see your code or your page can’t be ranked.  

Experience - A well interfaced website creating no barriers or problems for users is essential to gaining a following.  

Content - Great content intrigues readers which creates shares and links. Google recognizes this and rewards you.  

Marketing - As always, without promoting your content, it’s hard to get the word out.

1. Page Title

The first thing you need to know before you get started is what keywords you’re targeting. Even if you plan to optimize later, it’s helpful to know your keywords. You can start by inserting them into the page title. From an organizational standpoint, people want to see what they searched for looking right back at them in the results.


When your keywords are in the title, people will often use them in the anchor text to link to you. This allows Google to determine that a page is about a particular subject. Generally, keeping titles under 72 characters is preferred so it can be fully visible in results.

2. Meta Descriptions

The presentation of your content to search engines is still an integral part of SEO copywriting. It’s undecided if meta descriptions influence rank at all, but it really doesn’t matter. The meta description serves as a clincher to bring the traffic to your site through that last click. A successful meta description will summarize your page and convince the searcher that your content will satisfy what they’re searching for. Meta Descriptions should be under 165 characters so their full description is visible.

3. Content

Don’t let cobwebs form on your sites. The clearest function you need to provide is compelling and regularly updated content. The content needs to be direct. Internet readers will hardly reach for anything less in this age of instant gratification. Of course, that’s not to say that content should be brief. Providing content of a substantial length (in the 300-500 word range) will have a much easier time ranking than considerably shorter content. Other strategies such as bolding your keywords and including your keywords in subheadings may or may not produce results. If you’re going to do that, do it because it makes sense to do it and not because you’re looking for another way to achieve results.

 

Keyword Frequency

As one of the main building blocks of on-page SEO, keyword frequency undoubtedly impacts ranking. In the old days, it was all about jamming keywords into the content. However, these days a delicate ratio of keyword density is vital in balancing between the fine lines of excellent repetition of keywords and falling guilty of spam-like content. According to many experts, a keyword density greater than 5.5% could cause Google to penalize you. So make sure to measure your frequency against the overall length of your content if you’re having doubts. So in short, don’t be archaic and numbingly repeat keyword phrases thinking you’ll be the bread and butter of Google, likely the opposite will occur.

 

Page Links

When optimizing a web page, it’s absolutely necessary to be connected with other pages and content. Search engines value websites that are well indexed and deemed to be valuable to a great number of other webpages. Brian Clark of Copyblogger offers a few guidelines for page linking:

• Link to relevant content early in the body copy 
• Link to relevant pages every 120 words of content 
• Link to relevant interior pages of your site or other sites 
• Link with naturally relevant anchor text 

 These are tried and true practices that will surely help optimize any web page. However, when in doubt about what to do in your specific context, don’t always revert back to general rules thinking it’s the end-all-be-all. Rules are helpful, but are meant to be bent and sometimes broken. If you focus on being the quality results people are searching for, it’s hard to get lost. After all, that’s what the search engines are trying to do.

The practice of search engine optimization is more than just crafting keyword-optimized content and meta for your web pages. Any SEO web design expert knows that website optimization must also take into account the basic fundamentals of creating a user friendly web design and developing it on a powerful, search engine friendly platform that will promote optimum SEO gains.

As SEO web design tips noted in the previous post about what to look for in a search engine friendly CMS system, proper HTML structure has a great impact on overall performance of an organic SEO strategy. We're going to take that notion one step further in this SEO web design tips blog by highlighting some of the key ingredients that go into creating an SEO friendly web design.

SEO Friendly Website Development

Proper HTML language markup when developing a web design that must rank well in the search engines is the first step in ensuring SEO web design success. This best practice of SEO friendly web development can make a significant impact on the overall performance of your SEO campaign. Companies that specialize in SEO web friendly web design and development utilize SEO-friendly CSS techniques instead of regular HTML tags when creating fonts, colors and other universal website design styles. Doing this CSS technique keeps the HTML markup on a web page clean and concise for the search engine spiders. It also keeps the ratio of keyword-optimized text higher than that of websites that do not utilize CSS to style their web pages. Another critical SEO friendly web design technique that developers use is integrating the keyword-rich copy that is crawlable by search engine spiders as high up in the HTML markup as possible to ensure maximum SEO benefits. This makes the search engine spider's job easier and can lead to higher rankings in the organic search results.

SEO Friendly Content Management Systems

It's commonplace in the website design industry to develop websites on content management system (CMS) platforms. From a best SEO web design tips standpoint, not all CMS systems were built equally for search engine optimization benefits. Search engine friendly CMS systems such as Wordpress CMS or Exponent CMS gives website developers an edge over the competition because both of these CMS platforms have key features for SEO friendly web design such as customization of Meta Titles, Descriptions and Keywords tags. Both of these content management systems structure their HTML markup in an SEO-friendly fashion with clear, concise markup and usage of CSS style sheets.

SEO-Friendly Website Graphic Design

Certain graphical aspects of a website design can be further optimized for greater organic SEO value, with optimized images and videos leading the way. This blog post gives great tips on how to properly optimize images for the search engines. Optimized images can help build keyword relevancy of a web page and help boost rankings. SEO Friendly web design also focuses on website conversion rate optimization. This practice centers on analyzing how website visitors behave on a website and optimize the website for ease of use and calls to action in order to increase the likelihood of conversions. This is a basic fundamental of website optimization and SEO friendly web design.

Ease of Customization of the CMS

• Page title tags – which should be unique with an emphasis on keywords and phrase
• Meta Descriptions tag
• Meta Keywords tag

Functionality of the Search Engine Friendly CMS

It's SEO Web Design Tips' pleasure to put in a plug for our friends at OIC Group, Inc., who are presenting an incredibly valuable Local SEO Webinar tomorrow Thursday May 31st at 3pm Eastern time.

This free webinar will highlight the importance of search engine optimization for local businesses, and will showcase many actionable takeaway points that attendees can employ on their own websites.

Tomorrow's local SEO webinar will offer a wealth of insights for attendees in various industries and professions on how to get more traffic to your website. Local SEO Company OIC Group is pulling back the curtains on many "secrets" of the trade, from techniques to optimize your website to ways on how to increase your Google Places ranking.

After years of immersion, research, and testing, the SEO team at OIC Group has become an industry leader in local SEO and local Internet marketing. In tomorrow's webinar, specialists of the company plan to share a number of powerful SEO techniques and specific processes. Attendees can learn several ways to do some SEO of their own, such as:

• Proper Google Places SEO strategies
• Tips on how to keyword optimize a website
• How and where to build quality links for SEO
• Where to further promote your local business on the web

There have been a lot of recent changes taking place in online search. In an effort to provide more relevant, better quality search results, Google has been focusing more on the local orientation of its users. That is, Google is showing localized search results (commonly Google Places) based on the IP addresses of users' locations.

These shifts have not only impacted Google's search landscape, but have leveled the playing field. No longer is Google search solely for big-business brands with powerful websites and large local SEO marketing budgets. Now, local businesses can take advantage of an effective advertising and marketing platform that offers a highly targeted way to connect with in-market consumers.

To learn actionable tips and strategies that center on local search engine optimization, Google Places SEO, and other Internet marketing channels for local businesses, sign up for OIC Group’s webinar. The webinar is set for tomorrow (Thursday) at 2:00PM CST (3:00PM EST). To sign up for the webinar, click here.

Search engine optimization is the cornerstone of any successful website. In the past, web designers considered SEO to be a completely separate part of the Internet marketing strategy and as such, they would create shoddy websites without SEO in mind with poor HTML structure and use of outdated technology.

Time has disapproved this approach and web design has become integrated as an important part of optimizing your site for the search engines. If you are setting up a website or upgrading the one you have, there are a few basics on SEO web design that will come in handy. These tips on SEO for web designers are critical to ensure a client’s website is quickly indexed and ranks well in the search engines.

Page User Friendliness to Search Spiders

There is a misconception that web design is all about nice looking graphics with appealing drop down menus and Flash elements but this is not so. SEO experts know that though Flash might give you a fascinating looking page, Flash is almost completely non-SEO friendly to the search engines for indexation. Any site being optimized for search engines must use proper HTML structure with a focus on best practices for on-site SEO for easy indexing and search rankings. Some devices such as iPhone cannot view Flash pages again exacerbating the situation. One of the best SEO web design tips we can give you is to, Just say no to Flash.

JavaScript also poses the same conundrum. It is unreadable by search spiders and if it is absolutely necessary to create a section using it, ensure you have a HTML link of that page elsewhere on the site. Another inhibiting factor is the use of frames, which are popular with some web designers. Search spiders will overlook them and your page will not be indexed.

Use but Do Not Abuse Keywords

Everyone understands the importance of keywords and phrases that people are searching for and how to get more traffic, but most web designers still abuse them. SEO keywords should appear at important points such as URL, title and header tags, and throughout the web content, but must not be overused and be used only relevantly.

Page Redirects to Avoid Duplicate Content

Canonicalization is the process of ensuring that resources on your page have the same URL. 301 redirects are essential to secure link authority and improve page ranking. In addition, this helps to avoid signals of duplicate content, which would be penalized by search engines. This process applies for the home page and any consequent page with duplicate URL.

Web design isn't just about the graphics anymore. It's about proper HTML structure, usage of SEO keywords and SEO-friendly technologies that aid search engine spiders to easily access the information they need in order to rank a website high in the search results.

Now more than ever, most website design companies are adding SEO to their web design packages that they offer. The problem is that many of these self-proclaimed SEO and web design firms fail to fully understand the nature of search engine optimization, and how certain SEO elements apply to a website's back-end.
It is absolutely critical that your web design company knows the basics of SEO while putting together a website. Respecting the ever-so important SEO-friendly website elements of a site is imperative during the web design process. In this post, we discuss the specific aspects that web design companies need to be aware of when building sites with SEO in mind.

Aspects of SEO to Consider for Web Design

Designing and developing a well-optimized website must take into consideration the overall architecture, content structure, and back-end code of a site, or HTML. This includes aspects of both the on-page and off-page content and how it is presented on each page of the website.
The off-page SEO aspects of a webpage are the page's title and meta description. These critical content components should be presented as early as possible in HTML code of each page. The page title defines that page (and typically always includes a keyword phrase for SEO), so early reference of these elements is very important. The on-page elements of a webpage need to focus on quality, keyword optimized content that other-wise "SEO-friendly." In essence, SEO-friendly on-page content is that which can be crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. On-page content elements of the like include:

• text or copy on the page that can be parsed, or highlighted 
• relevant images (including a keyword optimized "Alt" tag in each image) 
• links (preferably keyword optimized cross-links between relevant pages of the site) 
• quality videos (which can be labeled and keyword optimized prior to uploading) 

On-page content that hinders the SEO process is the infamous Flash media. Flash has a reputation for causing pages to load very slowly which inhibits search engine spiders from crawling and indexing a webpage in an efficient manner. Although Flash is attractive and many web design companies use it, Flash is consider very code-heavy and is SEO no-no.

Choose Your CMS Carefully

Many website design companies built their sites around a content management system (CMS). The coding structure behind each CMS' website is different, and many are much more SEO-friendly than others. Here are some SEO considerations to keep in mind for website content management systems:

• CMS platforms that make use of code-cumbersome nestled tables can hinder SEO performance. Find a CMS that uses CSS style sheets which is much better for search engine crawling and indexing. 
• Always choose a CMS that will allow you custom write an optimized page title and meta description for each page. 
• Avoid content management systems that auto-generate static URLs. Pick a platform that enables you to write a dynamic, keyword friendly URL for each page. 
• Some CMS platforms will enable you to perform internal linking (or cross-linking) with ease. This will help make the SEO process more efficient for deep sites with many pages. 
• Only the most highly SEO-friendly CMS platforms automatically create a XML sitemap. This feature goes above and beyond and is something to look out for.

Smartly Select a Website Design Company

If you are hiring a web design company for both website design and local SEO company services, don't hesitate to ask them highly detailed, technical questions about their processes. If they fail to comply, then they are not the right firm for you. In short, there are far too many web design companies that promote search engine optimization, and yet failed perform SEO effectively. We hope this read has enlightened you and equipped your arsenal with some solid questions in selecting a SEO and website design company you can trust.

There are a few key variables that make for good SEO and web design synergy. In fact, there are many aspects of web design that contribute to SEO effectiveness, many of which hinge on the structure and organization of the site that is being optimized.

Good SEO begins with awareness of the web design elements that are important and risky. In essence, good SEO and web design teams know the aspects of a webpage that are fundamental to the SEO process, such as content, coding structure, navigation and usability.

Professional providers of SEO and website design also know which design elements that can hinder SEO performance, such as Flash and code-heavy pages. Below we outline three perspectives that define successful SEO and website design teams. You can use these points to help refine your own optimization efforts, or use them as an evaluation of your current SEO and web design provider.

Critical & Creative Thinking

An essential requirement for SEO and web design is being able to think creatively and critically. One sign that a SEO web design team is not seeing their services through this perspective is the uniqueness of their packages. Creative teams have custom, unique packages per client and they think critically in building each package and campaign. On the other end of the spectrum, there a many SEO and web design teams that offer cookie-cutter templates and automated packages that fail to use any creativity or critical thinking.

Understanding HTML Mark-up

Mark-up language is the heart of the web. Web pages are “marked up” with HTML and XML, which governs most data interchange on the Internet. Search engines recognize most content through mark-up language, which is why it is essential for a SEO to understand the basics of HTML. When web design and SEO clash, certain design elements are added to a page that inhibit the search engine performance of a webpage. In short, web designers may be quick to use robust coding structures, or even worse, Flash media. Many designers are unaware of the repercussions such web design elements have on SEO. When a search engine spiders attempt to crawl a page with Flash, they often choke and fail to index the page efficiently.

Know How Search Engines Work

Search engines are specifically designed to retrieve information, and there basic function is governed by precision and recall. That is, search engines are highly precise in the way in which they can retrieve information based on the user’s needs and they are able to recall information that is most relevant to the search query. These two principles form the basis from which strategies for SEO and web design can be developed.

With a good idea of the concepts of information retrieval, Atlanta Web Design and SEO teams can better organize their strategies in a cohesive logical manner. Critical thinking is also improved as service providers discover a wider source of relevant information from which conclusions can be drawn upon. Designers can structure pages to meet the content organization demands for SEO, all the while addressing aesthetic variables that help websites convert users. Formal SEO optimization education does not focus on these three foundational perspectives.

In most cases, SEO education is geared toward the methods and techniques that result in immediate results. Looking at SEO and web design from a broader perspective can often shed light on more long-term opportunities.

One of the SEO Web Design Tips that many companies are catching onto these days is approaching guest blogs and writing guest blog posts to promote their goods and services. This is one of the SEO Web Design Tips that provides great benefits for a company that writes a guest blog post for an industry related Website.

Writing a guest blog post offers benefits on both an SEO level, but also a branding level.

Why Would I write a Guest Blog Post?

When you write a guest blog post for another website that isn't run by you or your company, you're literally producing unique content and giving it to another site to post for a return in branding and local search engine optimization rewards. To get the most SEO benefits out of writing a guest blog post, you'll want to craft an article that discusses a topic relevant to your business, and then offer that guest blog post to an industry-relevant Website. So, if your business manufactures portable power module packages for generator sets, you'll want to write a guest blog post for a Blog focused on the power generation industry.

How do I Contribute Guest Blog Posts?

It's a pretty simple procedure if you want to contribute guest blog posts. Lots of these Websites are actually looking for people like you who want to provide these guest blog posts. Many of them feature a link on their site that straight up says “Become a Guest Blogger!”. It doesn't get much easier than that.

If they don't have an obvious link or page on their site about contributing guest blog posts, find their contact page and drop them a line. Inquire about your wish to provide them with your unique, industry-relevant content. I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised by the response.

Enjoy the Perks of Writing Guest Blog Posts

Writing guest blog posts for multiple Websites can deliver many search engine optimization gains:

• Should you start contributing guest blog posts, you're sure to get valuable backlinks for your Website from the Guest Blog. Acquiring these types of inbound links is a critical cog for increasing search engine rankings and bolstering natural SEO results.
• Your brand sees increased visibility when you contribute guest blog posts.
• One of the better perks of writing guest blog posts is getting in and networking with other business owners, marketing people who are running the guest blogs. You never know when or who your next great business deal or sale will come from!

Just think about it. Think about the benefits you can get from simply writing a guest blog post for another Website. Now think about what the benefits would be if you could become a guest blogger on several Websites! This SEO strategy of guest blogging is a great tactic for building up search rankings and increasing brand visibility for your company!

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.
The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

 

Optimized Header Tags & Content Structure

 

Well-Crafted, Unique Title Tags

 

Don't Keyword Stuff!

 

Have an Internal Linking Structure

 

Provide a Site Map

 

Double check for 404 Errors