How to Build an SEO Website

Friday February 10th, 2012

Creating an SEO website is not as easy as inserting keywords and links into your copy. A successful website takes into account both the people using it and the search engines ranking it. To become people friendly, your website should be a balance of aesthetics, usability, and strategy. You also need to understand how search engines work - they rank web pages, not websites. So, it's important that each of your web pages is optimized for search engines.

Here are some pointers to keep in mind when building your website:

Keep your design simple: Your website starts off with a clean slate, and you add design and content to it. Simple fonts, clear backgrounds, and no nonsense scripts will work best in helping your customers reach a buying decision. While clients love Flash, and we build some incredible flash designs for them, we always ensure it's the right reason for using it. This is because search engines are limited by what they can read in a Flash file. In addition, a Flash website may load slower, scaring away potential visitors. Flash designs can have a strong impact, but they need to be used with caution.

Make navigation easy: An easy to navigate site is one which has plenty of categories clearly defined, and sub categories within them. It will have a site map, which visitors can use to browse through the site or find the pages they are looking for. Include all your major services in your menu.

Create valuable content: Content is a great way to capture audience attention and to hide keywords which search engines can find. When possible, maintain content in all your pages, but make sure it reads well, is grammatically correct, and offers some kind of value to the reader. If you are inserting keywords and links, they should be relevant and fit within the context.

Design a strong home page: The first point of entry into your website is your home page and this should be a strong landing page which encourages visitors to browse your site. Keep it fun and simple or strong and heavy, but always ensure the content on it is engaging and will encourage visitors to stay.

Include titles and tags: When creating each of your web pages, you need to identify the titles and tags you can use; Google and other search engines regularly browse these to give your page its rank. Your page title or title tag is what appears in the bar at the top of your browser. Google uses this to identify your pages. Heading tags allow you to give title to each page and so allocate one H1 tag per page. Within the content you create, you can include keywords and links for stronger SEO. Alt tags are tags which describe images, and they are important if your website hosts a lot of images or if a majority of your audience use text-only browsers. Meta tags are descriptive tags that summarize what the website is about. You can include your main keywords in this and create a separate Meta tag for each page.

Encourage conversion rates with call to action: What do you want people to do once they visit your website? You might want them to purchase your products, share your articles or make a donation; whatever it is, you need a strong call to action on each page. This will help increase conversion rates which is your end objective.

How to Build an SEO Website

Friday February 10th, 2012

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