Let’s face it; many web designers out there that still don’t understand internet marketing or SEO in the least. Sometimes changes occur that everyone embraces but others fail to make the grade. For some reason SEO isn’t being embraced by designers, perhaps because it takes away from some of the artistic and creative values designers hold so dear. There is a fundamental dilemma between search engine optimization and human optimization, which is what designers do. However, there are things designers can do to optimize their designs for search engines.
Content
Be Unique – Having your own, unique content is a huge factor in search engine success.
Stay on it – Just as important as having original content is updating it frequently. New content as well as new updates to your site help. While it’s highly favorable to update lots of content, smaller changes may not be great.
Size Matters – When text is bigger on the page than other text this separates it and makes it more important, this applies to headers as well, which usually are bigger than the bulk of your text.
Don’t Forget to Format – On a webpage, words or phrases that have bold or italics on them show emphasis on them, making them important. As long as you don’t overdo it this will help your rank greatly.
Keywords
Titles – Your title tells visitors everything they need to know within a few words, so to must you tell the robots that crawl your site, what your site is about. Try to keep your keywords in the front of your title and avoid wordiness.
What’s your density? – The frequency of your keywords on a page matters substantially. The ideal ratio is somewhere between 3-7% for major keywords and 1-2% for minor ones and anything over 10% puts you in danger of being banned. In Firefox, simply right click and select show keyword density to see what your ratio is.
URL – Your URL is also very important and indicative of your overall theme. Try to include your main keywords in your main URL and sub pages however, if the keywords aren’t on your main page this won’t help much.
Anchor Text – Since inward links are so important thus so are the text on those links. When you can control it, get your best keyword(s) in there and avoid extra wording.
Things to Avoid
Flash – Flash can look cool but it lacks code for spiders to read. This means that your content is irrelevant as if it weren’t there. Having an entire page in flash is even worse since spiders won’t be able to read anything, this would be a serious mistake.
Javascript –JavaScript can be fine but if important content is displayed using java spiders have a harder time tracking your information and sometimes can’t track it at all.
Frames - Frames are a bots worst enemy, instead of actual code a few lines of text dictate what’s going to happen on the page. A bot get’s stuck inside of this and cannot index your website.
