Search Engine Tips
Here are seven tips for web design which will help both your visitor and the search engines best use your site.
1. Organize your website logically in outline form. Your front page should only provide links to the main topic groups. Each of those topic groups pages should provide links further down in the outline. Don’t go below three sub topics, though. Neither visitors nor search engines will drill down that far. To ensure that your entire web site is completely crawled by search engines, consider creating a site map for the search engines to follow.
2. Use a tag line or slogan on your front page. It should be a practical sentence with your top keywords in plain text near the top of the homepage.
3. Group like elements together in sections and provide information about the relationships between them. State the main topic of a paragraph either in the header or in the first couple of words. Focusing on your keywords as the topic of a section, use headings and subheadings to group long pages into blocks. Use header tags such as H1, H2, etc. Headings, subheadings, column headers and page descriptions are all excellent ways to feed engine spiders clues about the page theme and they help users scan content or listen to a page using special-needs software. Studies show people scan related items in groups before moving on.
4. Provide keywords in text-based hyperlinks such as "Please click here to learn more about keyword" provides subject clues and helps the user stay on track while maneuvering around the site. Using standard hyperlink underlines is always a good idea because it's what users expect.
5. Use common language that users will recognize quickly while scanning a page. Keep your strongest keywords and most important information in the top-middle of all pages.
6. Adding captions above or below graphics both to aid users and search engines. Use keywords if possible. Adding text to the alt tag behind an image (using keywords, of course) is a good way to provide additional information about the image. This is a great aid to those who surf with images off or use screen readers - not to mention the benefits provided to the search engines. If you don't add alt text, use "" so screen readers will skip the image. See our article on Designing Accessible Web Sites.
7. Minimize animation. Movement is distracting.
