SEO Tips To Optimize Your Web Design
We won’t be giving away all our web optimization service secrets here – there isn’t enough time! Here are four easy SEO tips that you can use to optimize your website design today.
Is Your Site Navigation Search Engine Friendly?
Using Flash for navigation on your website is a no-no if you don’t know how to make Flash objects accessible and crawler-friendly. This is because search engines struggle to crawl sites that use Flash. Unobtrusive JavaScript and CSS are available for practically any fancy effects for which you are looking. This is all without sacrificing your search engine ranking.
Do You Use Content That Search Engine Spiders Can Read?
Content is your website’s bread and butter, and it is what search engines feed on. When you are having your site designed, your designer will consider how your content needs to be structured (links, paragraphs and headings).
If a site has little in the way of substance, it will struggle to reach the desired search rankings. Most of the time, you can avoid this by planning during the design phases. For instance, do not use imaging for written content unless there is a way to use CSS background-image text replacement.
Have You Designed Your URLs For Search Engine Friendliness?
Some of the best URLs around tend to contain keywords that help describe the page’s content. Be wary of some content management systems that use unique code and generated numbers for page URLs. Good CMS’s will give you the option to customize your site’s URLs.
Are Pages You Don’t Want Search Engines To Index Blocked?
Pages that don’t add value to your content such as server-side scripts should not be indexed. Another kind of page that you may want left out are ones that you are using to test designs. It is important that you don’t expose these pages to web robots as you may encounter issues with duplicate content with search engines and dilute your content’s density. These effects will have negative results on your site’s search rankings.
To prevent some pages from being indexed, you can use a robots.txt file. Thereafter, if you are using certain pages as testing environments, be sure to make it password-protected or consider using a local web development environment like WampServer or XAMPP.
That’s it, four quickie tips to keep your SEO ranking the best it can be. To go beyond the beginner level when it comes to your web design, schedule a meeting with us at Webmax.ca for top-notch web optimization services. We are here to help.