How To Optimize A Website Properly For Search Engines While Designing

Posted by Justin Nwosu in Web Development on 04-08-2010

Tags: design website, search engine-optimized, website design

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Search engine optimization of any site should start during the time it’s being designed. But unfortunately, many website designers do not follow the guidelines set forth by major search engines. And this has led many sites to crumble in organic search.

During web crawling, search bots or spiders look for emphasis placed on some words, as it helps them to identify the theme of each web page. Though you cannot expect search engines to rank your web page for every word in it, but you can help them to discover the keywords that matter most to you. That said, so you have to give more importance to some words over others, to help search bots to prioritize them.

How to make sure your design is search engine-optimized
Every web page should contain all the necessary tags (Title tag, Meta Keywords, Meta Description and Heading tags, which include H1, H2, H3, etc). Although implementing these alone will not command search engines to rank your site high on their SERPs, they help to guide search bots to the most important keywords on the site’s web pages.

Title tag (<title> </title>) – Page titles normally define the content of a web page. This piece of information is displayed by search engines as the subject of the web page when it appears on search results. It enables Internet searchers to understand the content, without even visiting the web page. The words found in the title carry more weight than other words in the page’s content. So, you will not want to leave your page’s title empty or use something meaningless, like “Untitled”. It is recommended that you use the most important key phrase the page targets as the Title. The maximum length of Title tag is 65 characters, including spaces.
Meta Keywords (<meta name=”keywords” content=“” />) – This Meta tag is increasingly been disregarded by search engines, due to keyword stuffing by unscrupulous webmasters who intend to manipulate their ranking algorithms. Google, for example stopped noticing keywords over a year ago, but having it in place doesn’t attract any penalty. Bing still regards it a bit, and so, it’s still worth the hassle to use Meta keywords. However, do not allow the length of your page’s Meta keywords to exceed 250 characters, including spaces.
Meta Description (<meta name=”description” content=“” />) – This tag is the summation of a web page’s content, and it should be filled. Search engines use it to describe a web page that appears on their SERPs. A catchy sentence or two is normally fine for Meta description tag. The maximum length is 160 characters, including spaces, lest, the remaining words will be cut off, making your description meaningless.
Heading tags (<h1> </h1>, <h2> </h2>, <h3> </h3>, <h4> </h4>, etc) – Heading tags are used by professional website designers and developers to emphasize the greater weight of certain words over others in the passages of web pages. And search engine bots prioritize these words accordingly. So, use them wisely in the body (<body> </body>) area of every web page to emphasize your targeted keywords.
Internal linking structure – Where possible, make sure all the web pages that matter to you are linked to site-wide, to aid search bots and human beings discover them.

Avoid cloaking – This is the practice of showing a version of content to search engine spiders, while another version is shown to humans. Its intent is to deceive search engines to rank a web page for some keywords it is not worthy of being ranked for. But the search engines we have today are smart enough to detect and penalize any site that implements cloaking technique.

Sitemaps – A sitemap is a page that contains links to all the important web pages of a website. There are three (3) types of sitemaps, namely, XML sitemap, HTML sitemap and URL list. An XML sitemap is an Xtensible Markup Language file a webmaster submits to search engines through their Webmaster Tools, to aid search bots to discover a site’s web pages. Make sure you create and submit it to all the major search engines. An HTML sitemap is an ordinary Hypertext Markup Language file that contains links to all the important web pages of a site, to assist humans and bots locate a site’s web pages in one place. URL list is just a text file that lists all the important URLs of a website. The latter is supported by Yahoo Search.

So, place your keywords where they matter most to humans and search bots alike, in order to create the best desired impact. However, don’t pack all the keywords your site targets on one (1) web page, but split them up and share them among the homepage and internal pages, according to their content.