SEO Strategy In Website Design

by blogmistress on June 15, 2011

SEO Stragegy and Website DesignAre you thinking about SEO strategy in your website design? When most businesses look for a website design, they want an attractive website that is easy to navigate. However, there are several things a savvy web designer can do to help your business website get found online by search engines and your potential customers.

XML Sitemap – a sitemap (small s) is list of pages on your website. An XML Sitemap (capital S) is a document structure and encoding standard used as the standard for web spiders to find and parse Sitemaps. You can find out if you have an XML Sitemap for your site by looking for the Sitemap URL, ie. www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. If you have an XML Sitemap, you will see a list of your pages and the date they were last modified. If you do not have an XML Sitemap, you will get a “page not found” error.

Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol. An XML Sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the most updated page information. An XML Sitemap is the best way to let search engines know about your website.

CSS – In the old days of web design, all of the style elements of your site such as font type, size and color, background color, etc. were included in the code that makes up your website. Now, all of that code is usually included in the cascading style sheet or CSS.

Using CSS gives you some important advantages. First, because the style is separate from the code that makes up your website, your keywords are more apparent to search engines because they don’t have to navigate through all that style information. In fact, your style sheet can be a separate document from you web pages, allowing you to make a change in style to the style sheet and have that one change effect all of your web pages. Second, you can create style sheets that will render your site differently for different devices such as mobile devices or printers.

Keyword Placement – Once you have selected several keywords that you have researched and decided are right for your business website, the placement of those keywords will help search engines know that those are the words that are important for your site. To do this, the keywords should be placed in your page title, the text of your page and perhaps the alt tags of your pictures. You don’t want to “keyword stuff” as we have discussed before here, however, you do want your keywords to be in the right strategic places.

Having a pretty site that doesn’t get found and/or doesn’t help you grow your business does you no good. Many web designers will be familiar with XML Sitemaps, CSS and Keyword Placement, but there are still some out there that haven’t caught up yet. Ask questions and do research to make sure your SEO Strategy is included with your website design!



Get A Free Website Analysis


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

116,661 Spam Comments Blocked so far by Spam Free Wordpress

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post:

Next post: