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Copywriting TipsDesigning Your Site For The Search Engines
by:
Angie Noack
Once
you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitant with a altogether some agenda: they're not going to be looking at your pretty logotype and they're not going to be passing judgement on your background colour. What they're looking for is the content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.
Make Your Structure Clear.
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be really clean to the search engine wherever
the navigation is, wherever
the content is, and wherever
the headings are. As a rule, put navigation 1st in your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid victimisation generic span and div tags and only production
things clean to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic' Mark up
tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use the blockquote tag; if you're posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent.
It's not ordinarily worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking – the engines have pretty more wised up to this manoeuvre – but do do sure that your keywords appear systematically
once
they occur naturally. For example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website' throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would-be bring down my rankings.
HTML and Javascript.
It's worth noting that search engines see HTML, but they don't, in general, see Javascript. That means that victimisation Javascript to insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines to see the text. On the else hand, you strength
want to have simply the text in Mark up
and insert all the else parts of the page with Javascript: this wish tend to do your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.
Use Meta Tags.
Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more once
it comes to ranking your site, but they're still important in one way: the meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines' users see once
they find your site in their results! This can be simply as important as the ranking itself – write thing
here that wish look useful to the searcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through. Don't forget that, spell search engines are simply machines and algorithms, the end result of it all makes involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages.
You strength
think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page displaying a full-page version of your logotype (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines actually hate that. Victimisation this trick wish get you hierarchic far lower than you would-be ordinarily be, so you should avoid it – it's annoying to visitors anyway.
Include Alt Tags.
Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it – especially if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics strength
as well simply be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains comparatively
intact. If it doesn't, then you'll be turning search engines away.
Finally, Write Great Content.
The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have least control over) is how many an folk decide to link to your page from their page. How can you do more folk link to you? Do your content useful. Do it thing
they'll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it's ever been, and the better way to design for search engines is to do your content actually stand out.
Just about the author:
Angie is the lead web designer for a fortune 500 company. See her thoughts on web design on her blog... http://www.webdesignblogonline.com
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