Building a Search Engine Friendly Web Design

[Dominick Arnold]

Search engines (SE) play a vital role in helping users find
information over the Internet. With the use of certain keywords, users
are able to find web pages filtered by search engines in terms of
relevance, making it easier for them to find the information they
need. With Google alone, billions of search queries are done every
month (US). Add that up with queries from other major search engines
such as Yahoo and AOL, this massive amount of usage makes search
engines the biggest source of traffic for any website.
Seeing how beneficial they can be for websites, the question now is
how to appear on the first few pages of the search results for their
targeted keywords? Since people tend to stop browsing search results
after a few pages, it is thus important for websites to come up on the
first page of search results. Aside from Search Engine Optimization
(off-site SEO in particular), having a search engine friendly (SEF)
web design helps boost the search rank of a website.
Search engine friendly web design is aimed at building websites on a
framework that is easily read by engines therefore giving them a
higher chance on gaining good position in search rankings. Website
owners and web designers have become well aware of the importance of
building search engine friendly web design, but for those who are
relatively new to this concept, here are some thing to take note of in
order to build an SEF web design:
1. Meta tags. Meta tags can be found in the head section of an HTML
document. Though meta tags are no longer as influential as they were
before in terms of search rankings, they can still boost a websites
popularity in search engines. The title tag very much affects on how
these engines categorize your website, therefore its important to have
a relevant title tag on the pages of your website. The meta keywords
and description provide additional information about your web page.
Some engines use the meta description as the information below the
link to your web page in search results.
2. Search engine friendly URLs. An example of a search engine friendly
URL would be econowebexpress.com/full-feature-list. With keywords
listed on the URL, it's rather SE friendly compared to URLs with
random alphanumeric characters and symbols. Not only does it help you
boost your search ranking, it's also easier for your readers to
remember.
3. Content. Needless to say, the content of your web page should
contain relevant keywords since search engines would rank websites
based on the relevance of their content with search keywords.
4. Flash design. Since search engines rely heavily on text content in
their indexing, websites made purely or mostly made in flash or may
not be considered as search engine friendly web design. Before,
content placed in flash are not readable by web spiders, but now there
are tweaks on how to optimize flash for search engines.
5. Site map. Having a site map increases your website's SE
friendliness. A better way of making a site map is by using keywords
or phrases that is targeted by the said page that you are linking to.
6. Alt tags on images. Since images are not being crawled by web
spiders, placing an alt tag on images helps boost ranking since it's
readable by major search engines.
Having a search engine friendly web design helps boost search engine
ranking, therefore a concept that should not be taken for granted by
website owners and designers. It is a big help in terms of search
engine optimization. But since SEO is a very dynamic concept, what may
be effective techniques today may no longer be effective tomorrow. The
same holds true web the concept of search engine friendly web design.
It is best website owners and designers should be updated with the
latest concepts in web design and search engine optimization.