Author: Dean Chu

Date: August 24, 2007

 

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most time consuming web designing tasks in website design. While it is not rocket science to optimize your website for search engines for better page ranking and link popularity, it does require a certain amount of patience and basic understanding of web design elements to properly optimize your website for search engines. The key to your success lies in how effectively you incorporate your web page's keywords into the following elements that are vital to search engine optimization success:

Title Tags are meta tags that tell the search engine the title of the web page- The title tag is also displayed at the top of your browser window. It would be tempting to put your phone number or address into the title tag, but this would not help with your search engine optimization effort. Instead put keywords into your title tags and it will serve both purposes of describing the page and improving your search engine optimization success. The title meta tag is considered by some search engine optimization experts as the most important meta tags for search engine optimization, they believe that keywords are obsolete for major search engines.

Description meta tags are meta tags search engines use to describe websites - Some Search Engine Optimizers or SEO's argue that the description tags are unimportant because today's search engine like Google and Yahoo generate their own description of your website from your web page's content. However, it is a fact that some smaller search engines still use the description meta tags, and having it do not hurt your search engine optimization effort. So what if it doesn't help, shouldn't you have it anyway if you want the smaller search engines to index your website properly? Everyone is buzzing about the importance of having incoming links in order to improve their Google page ranking and they would risk their own website ranking by joining link farms and link exchange schemes. Why then would you neglect to properly index your website for smaller search engines by simply adding one extra meta tag? Make sure you include your primary keywords in your description tags.

Keywords Tags are meta tags that some SEO's consider as most important - While others think it is obsolete for search engine optimization. The issue is divided among Search Engine Optimization professionals. One thing for certain, is that most SEO experts agree that having keywords meta tags does not hurt your search engine optimization or page ranking status. If it doesn't hurt your search engine optimization and you wish to use it, you should use it and let it help you focus on writing your website's content since the website's content will be written around the keywords.

Should you decide to use the keywords meta tags, choose keywords that best relate to the information, products or services that you are offering. For example, if you are designing a website about "Search Engine Optimization" in Canada, you would include "Canada Search Engine Optimization" or "Canadian Search Engine Optimization" in your keywords. Remember to optimize every page in your site and only use keywords pertaining to that page.

URL Tags or URL meta tags are the URL names following your domain name - You have complete freedom in naming these URL's any names you wish, where as domain names are static. When naming your URL use primary keywords, for example if your page is about search engine optimization, then you should include the keywords "Search Engine Optimization" in the URL name. If you practice this consistently search engines will reward you for it. The most important thing about URL naming is choose an URL name and stick to it, because once a page is indexed by search engines and you decide to change the name of the URL, you would have undone most of your search engine optimization effort and it could take awhile before the new page gets indexed. Search engine don't like redirects all that much because it has been abused and misused by many spammers.

ALT Tags are meta tags that specify text description for images - ALT text are usually visible when the image element which is to be rendered cannot be rendered, or when the pointer is hovering over the image (Internet Explorer). Search engines cannot analyze images for its contents, so it rely on ALT tags to provide a description of those images. As a search engine optimizer you should take advantage of this need for ALT tag by search engine robots and use your keywords to describe the images and have it count toward your search engine optimization success.

Headings tags are important meta tags to search engine optimization - Most search engines place high priority over keyword-rich contents, but when search engines see two pages with similar keyword-rich contents, where both have similar page rank and link popularity, how would the search engine know which one to rank first? I suspect that the one gets higher ranking from a search engine robots is the one that utilizes heading tags on keywords or keyphrases to emphasize those key elements.

You may be tempted apply headings tags to the whole page, but try to resist that because it will get ignored by search engines robots since it doesn't know which portion of your content to emphasize. By your design the search engine robots should place high importance on every words in your page, and that is simply not true; none of us is that special. Beside from getting penalize as spammer by search engines, your users will quickly get annoyed with reading everything in bold lettering and will leave your site. Should this happen all your search engine optimization efforts would have been wasted.

Image Names should be optimized for search engine - Major search engines now allow for image search by keywords. So when you optimize your website do not forget to rename your .jpg, .gif, .png and other image files to your primary keywords. For example if your are optimizing your website for "Search Engine Optimization" and you have a picture of the globe, you should rename that image search-engine-optimization.jpg or search-engine-optimization-globe.gif, it will do more good than naming it worldglobe.jpg.

Anchor tags or Hyperlinks are links to other sections of your website - websites that have numerous anchor tags are beneficial to both human and robot audiences. These anchor tags demonstrate depth to your website design and shows correlation between pages and contents, hence "the web". The anchor tags also help human and robots to determine the content of the link-to page and this is extremely important in search engine optimization. Key points to remember when you are optimizing your anchor text:

• Try to avoid simple links, use long keyphrases, for example, instead of an anchor text that says "Contact Us" try "Contact Search Engine Optimization Consultant" and when in doubt use the URL name of the page to which you are linking. Assuming that you optimized that URL name.
• When you are optimizing your web page for search engine, remember to optimize it for your readers as well, so avoid linking every other sentences of your web page to every other pages of your website because it will make your web page look spammy and it will turn people off.

Content is the most important search engine optimization element - You should pay the most attention to the content section of your web page, by making it as keyword-rich as possible. This is where you entice the search engines to give you high ranking and this is also where you entice your "potential customers" to become your clients. So flex your muscle well and write effectively for both your human and search engine robots audiences. While it is necessary to repeat your keywords multiple times in order to rank well with search engines, you may wish to consider your human audience. If your text content if riffle with keywords to the point that it is repetitive it will become redundant and subsequently ignored. Find a balance between writing contents for search engine robots and human audience. Neither of which you can afford to offend.

The above are the nine easy and essential steps to better website design and search engine optimization. If you are a budding web designer, try to develop good habits from the start. Short cuts and bad habits, especially when it promise "short term" gains are tempting and easy to pick up but it can be a hassle to quit, much like smoking. Keep in mind that chances are you will own a number of websites and they all interlink to one-another. Should you ever get caught and penalized by search engines, such as Google, for spamming on one of those websites, any websites that excessively link back to the penalized website may get penalize by association, much like second hand smoke. I hope this information helps, if you have any question or feedback please feel free to contact Dean Chu Internet Web Consultant.

Author Bio: Dean Chu a sales and marketing professional offering website design and web marketing consultation. This article is copyrighted and you may use this article free of charge provided you keep the about the author with link intact.