Whether your website consists of a small brochure, thousands of dynamic pages, or anything in between, what they have in common is the need to include certain design aspects in order to accomplish successful Search Engine Optimisation.

Design Aspects, what are they?

Firstly, size. Search engines love content, the more the better. If your competitors have more than you do, you need to address that. If you can’t find enough information about your product try adding free resources which will help broaden your scope and keep your visitors interested.

Graphics are important. But while those websites offering an aesthetic presence seem to attract more traffic, they are difficult to optimise as search engine robots cannot read any text within the graphics. If your website is heavy on graphics you should consider creating an HTML side for your site. This will help promote your rankings and offer visitors content.

Websites which rely heavily on large databases find that some pages cannot get indexed. These are known as ‘dynamic’ and are identifiable by their URL’s which contain a lot of characters as well as long strings of numbers. These pages are automatically generated by their databases which make them hard for search engines to keep them up to date or relevant. One solution for this is to offer the search engine a site map listing all strategic pages so that they know you have permanent content, or you may want to consider making sure the pages have a good internal linking system which may carry weight.

Use HTML properly and correctly. Word processors have a way to create HTML documents which make it easy to upload them onto a website via .ftp, but what the search engine robots most often see are lines of font not relevant to the content. The more efficient the code is, the higher your rankings. Hand coding is the best method. Another reason for low rankings are pages which contain lots of hyperlinks, bold or italicised text or pages which make use of improper headings and/or comment tags.

Domain Names

Keep your customers needs in mind above all else, especially when choosing a domain name. Pick one that gives a brief description of either your company name or a brief description of your product. Domain names go a long way in helping with SEO because it is one more area of your site that is looked at by a search engine in their quest for keywords. Don’t choose long winded domain names, or ones that contain a lot of hyphens or numbers, they are hard to remember and don’t do you any favours with a search engine because robots don’t recognise numbers, plus they stop their search when they encounter a hyphen.

If you have to change your domain name for whatever reason, make use of the ‘301 redirect’ as it allows you to keep the rankings of your old domain name while forwarding your visitors to your new site,

What else?

Frames for one as well as keeping your information updated. Any website created with the use of frames will stop a search engine robot cold in their tracks and makes book marking especially difficult. Make use of PHP methods instead.

Don’t allow your website to become stagnant, update your information regularly as old information is frowned upon in search engines. Websites that are updated tend to grow and they are the ones that experience higher rankings.

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