Integrating SEO and Webpage Design
All web designers know that there are two main qualities in every good website, those being how the website looks and how the website ranks in search engines. It is very important for webpages to look good so that visitors on the page are not turned away. However, visitors will never even get to the site of evena best designed webpage unless there has been some search engine optimization (SEO). Putting together these fundamentals of effective website design can be complex, and compromises are almost always needed.
The balance between website look and performance begin with SEO. It doesn't make any difference how beautifully you design your pages, if you don't generate traffic to the site, no one will see it. The essential aspects of search engine optimization include linking between the pages of your site, backlinks from other sites, meta tags, proper image tags, and keyword density. Each of these factors plays an importnat role when you start designing your website.
A successful website has to have enough content to allow for proper keyword density. This means that if your keyword is seen to many times in the content of your webpage, search algorithms will penalize a site. Sometimes this penaty is severe, for cramming too many search terms into too little text. This is called keyword stuffing. Your content must lengthy enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to keep visitor attention.
It is also important to remember that search engines still onot read images. So incuding screenshots or video as the bulk of your content it not wise, as the aearch engine will have a tough time figuring out what your webpage is about. The search algorithms have not yet designed means of indexing images. Words, and not images, are what drive SEO. text is still the all important factor.
The next step is to make sure that all images are tagged with an "alt" tag in HTML. Each and every image should have this tag. It helps tell the web browser which text will pop up when visitors run their mouse over the image. These alt tag names of every image should have an SEO-friendly title. This means that if you use a picture of a canary on your website, you should choose the name my.pet.canary.jpg instaed of using an obscure title such as 86giraf98My.jpg. This puts more keywords into the HTML for your pages.
Internal links are another important step in SEO. This means including links between the pages of your site. Aside from offering your visitors internal navigation that keeps them on your site, the links you create with keyword-rich text help the search engines index your pages.
For example, if you have a page on your travel named "Marketing Plan," you could create a link to that page from every other page on your site with the keywords "Marketing Plan." This way you not only signal the search engines that you have created a page, but you tell them what the page is about. Remember, images do not help SEO (unless it has an alt tag) so using images as menu buttons is not the best practice anymore.
The ultimate rule for integrating webpage design and SEO is to keep it simple! Use images and flash only sparingly. Do not use excessive images. Avoid complex design that make the page slow to load. Paying attention to these important factors will help the SEO of your site.