When designing or re-designing a website. Web Design for SEO is a crucial aspect of making sure your website actually gets found on search engines.
Everybody(including us) is talking about links these days. But getting good links pointed at your website is only half the battle. On-Page SEO or Web Design for SEO is the other half of that battle. If you know anything about professional link building you know that a link to your site is a recommendation from one site to yours. Google and other search engines do not like it when you have hundreds even thousands of links pointed at your site about a topic and then when Google indexes your site, it can’t find that your site is actually worthy of those links.
That’s why every site that wants to be found on the first page of Google needs to have more than just links pointed at it. You need to design your website with search engine optimization in mind. In this article I’m going to cover all major aspects of constructing a website or page so that Google and other search engines can easily find, index and show your site/page in SERP’s.
Content
Content has and will forever be king. Make sure you have a good content to code ratio. I like to keep mine around 50%. Now having a good content ratio is not enough. You’re content needs to be relevant to your keywords. So if I wanted to be found for San Diego SEO. I’d make sure my content had mentions of San Diego, California, Southern California and SEO, search engine optimization, etc.. Don’t over do it with your keywords in your content though, it can get you penalized from Google. They call it “Keyword Stuffing”. So try to incorporate your keywords and relevant words into your content naturally.
Headers
Your headers are usually the titles(not your title tags) of your posts and sections of your posts. Take the words “Headers” in bold. It acts as the title to this subsection on headers. The code I used to make “Headers” larger and bold is <h3>Headers</h3>. This not only tells your web browser to show this text differently, but it also shows search engines like Google that this page and section are about headers. I suggest using only h1-h4, but different SEO structures might call for more.
The h1 tag is the strongest and you should only use one of these per page. Your h1 tag should be the hardest(usually the shortest) keyword you are trying to rank for. Then use the h2-h4 tags to support your h1 tags.
Meta Data
Your Meta Data is literally how you tell Google what your site is about. The meta data doesn’t show up in the design of your website, but it is definitely a crucial part of web design for seo. Your meta data goes in your header, which is dictated by <head></head> tags. Everything between the >< is part of the header. There are 3 main types of meata data(for info on using more meta than these 3 check out The Dublin Core). The 3 main types are title, keywords and description.
- Title Tags-Your title tags are placed between <title> and </title> inside your <head> tags. Simply use the keywords you are targeting, try to keep it under 70 characters.
- Description-Your meta description goes in your header as well and it looks like this <meta name=”description” content=”Put Your Meta Description Here” /> Your meta description should be between 70-160 characters and it should not just support your keywords and title tags. It also needs to make you stand out on SERP’s(search engine results pages).
- Your Title and Description are both typically used on SERP’s for queries.
- Keywords-I only mention the keyword meta tag because everyone else does. I don’t use them because most browsers(i.e. firefox, internet explorer) don’t use them.
Well there you have some basics on Web Design for SEO. If you would like a more detailed report for your website or blog get a free Specialized SEO Report
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