SEO Web Design Tips for Creating SEO Friendly Web Design!

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.