It seems there’s ongoing confusion about the “do’s and don’ts” of website design when it comes to SEO. The goal here is not to belabor the complex details of web design but to highlight some crucial tips for making your site search engine and market friendly. Here are ten best practices for a friendly web design.

With regards to your design and how you include keywords within your content and page elements it’s important to maintain congruency or consistency to your theme. In other words, various tags and elements should include keywords that are also included within the content of your page. Otherwise your efforts become less effective and can even confuse the search engines as to what the theme and focal points of your various web pages are.

1. Title Tags: Your Title tags must contain keywords and try limiting them to no more than 65-70 characters long, including spaces – I realize this can be challenging but do your best. Two ways to economize characters are to use ‘&’ for ‘and’ and incorporate spacers. Also be as specific as you can in terms of describing your products or services within the 65 characters. Titles are the right place to use primary keywords as discussed in the keywords post.
   

   ex/ “Healthy Diet & Weightloss | Adkins Diet”

   ex/ “Dana’s Diet Solutions Nashville TN | Adkins Diet” — Always include your local business name and city/state if you own a local or regional business.

   Note: Businesses competing only locally and regionally should definitely include their address and phone number in the website header or somewhere in the body or footer of the page.  This should be typed in as part of the content and not in the form of an image. In fact I would probably put it in the header and the footer.

 
2. You must use header tags for section headings instead of merely bolding or using larger text. The h1-h6 header tags are all well-recognized by the search engines. Again, primary keywords are great choices here but not entirely necessary.
   

   ex/ <h1>Weightloss Secrets By Adkins Himself</h1>

 
3. It’s helpful to mix in bold, underline, or italics tags (<b>, <u>, <i>) to add some power to your SEO when combined with keywords. I use them to highlight keyword-rich anchor text for links on occasion or to simply emphasize a point in mid-paragraph.
 
4. Meta tags, descriptions and keywords are considered helpful but limit your list of Meta keywords to just 10 and make sure your description includes keywords but is also appealing to a human reader.  Keep the Meta description section a maxium of 150 characters long; this includes spaces. Primary keywords are a must.
 
5. Use image names and alt attributes (alt tags) that are realistic and consistent with the site’s theme and also based on keywords. Primary keywords and/or secondary keywords based on the page content itself are fine.
   

   ex/ For a website about the UNC Tarheels, having an image named “UNC Tarheels.jpg” with ‘alt = “UNC Tarheels” ‘

 
6. Avoid the use of frames, inline styling, and outdated HTML code.  Use CSS for all your styling and develop page content with current XHTML.  Following these rules will lower the page download time and make it much easier for the web crawlers to scan your site.
 
7. Avoid Flash “splash pages” or excessive Flash usage. There are ways to tweak the newest version of Flash to help with SEO, but Flash is not worth all the hubbub in my humble opinion. Stationary Flash elements, such as headers, are better than Flash movies. Use Flash sparingly within your site.To learn more, go here.
 
8. When possible, eliminate confusing Dynamic URL’s created by Content Management System (WordPress, Joomla, Etc.). A great example an unfriendly dynamic URL is….
   

   http://www.alabasterbox.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6I

   I much prefer WordPress (discussed in a later post) and consider it the best as a CMS (content management system) for a number of reasons. But there appear to be ways within Joomla to rectify this problem. Before choosing a CMS make sure you can create search engine friendly URL’s within your site and whenever linking internally to or to external pages, use a keyword as the anchor text instead of the generic “click here.”

   Example of an SEO-friendly link created in a WordPress blog

   http://www.dietandfitnessdiaries.com/2009/10/reflections-on-diet-and-nutrition/

   Example of Keyword-Rich Anchor Text

   Train your dog instead of Click here for dog training tips

 
9. Logical Flow is Key! What I mean is, there should be a direct relationship among your keyword rich Title Tags, Meta Tags, Header Tags, and page content.
   ex/

   Page Title: "Chocolate Bon Bons by George | Nashville, TN"

   Description Meta Tag: "George specializes in tasty chocolate
   bon bons, plus other dark chocolate treats. We're located in
   downtown Nashville, TN."

   Keyword Meta Tag: "chocolate bon bon, chocolate treats, dark
   chocolate, nashville, tn"

   Header Tags: Tasty Chocolate Bon Bons, Nashville's Finest,
   Dark Chocolate, Downtown Nashville

 
10. Use the right design style for your type business. A physician’s office would do themselves no good by having bright obnoxious graphics resembling “Mardi Gras” on their site. Cater to your target audience with the look and feel of your site.
 
11. Do use images but also leave white space and organize your site making it easy to read and pleasing to the eye. Look how much information the Yahoo home page contains yet it’s not overwhelming or too cluttered.
 
12. My last word of wisdom on this topic often goes overlooked and that is the fact that there’s more value to your site beyond the “home page.” If you think about it, each page within your site tends to have a different point of emphasis which means each page can be optimized individually. My recommendation is to optimize each page for different keywords within your quality keyword list. Sure there will inherently be overlap but if you take a look at your home page and, say, your products or services page, it’s evident that each will have different points of emphasis. The optimization activities described above can and should be applied to each page, not just the home page.
 

For more advice on keywords, the driving force behind the layout and substance of your website content, please read our keyword post if you’ve not done so already.  Otherwise please move onto to read about the the ever important topic of Google Maps Optimization.  This is one of the most effective things you can do to promote your business online!