Website designs play a major role in the SEO of a site. A big part of search engine optimization responsibility lies with the website designer. Unfortunately, an alarming number of website designers are not fully aware of how a good SEO site should be built. Instead, most designers concentrate on color schemes and images they think will make the site more attractive to users.
A good website design is a lot about creative, innovative ideas. More importantly, it’s about user appeal. A web page is only attractive so far as users find it attractive. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if you, as a designer, think its ugly. If it works for the user, it’s a good design.
Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of creating an effective SEO web design:

1. Pretty Codes – Always use a semantic code. Search engines find it easier to read descriptive tags and understand content thereof. Besides, your site’s styling is much cleaner using semantic code.
2. Stop the Abuse – Keywords must be used to describe your content, and make sense when they do. Use keywords in the main body of content only where required. Avoid keyword stuffing – using keywords as many times as possible without sentences making much sense. Additionally, limit keyword usage to url, title tag, and heading tags.
3. Simplify Navigation – Do not use Flash no matter how stylish the drop down effects are. Search engines don’t read Flash, which means your links will not be followed.
4. Make them Unique – Each page should have a different page title. Using the same page title across all pages will mean you are duplicating content, which search engines disfavor.
5. Image Description – Search engines don’t read images. They read text. Use the alt attribute to describe an image to make sure search engines list you in image searches.
6. Don’t Generalize – Link to relevant content but don’t forget to use a keyword in the link to describe the content you are linking to. Links with ‘learn more about puppies’ is better than a generic link that say ‘learn more’.
7. AJAX Use – enhances user experience but try to use it sparingly. AJAX content cannot be linked to. So, if you have an individual AJAX generated page, avoid using it.
8. Quick Indexing – Submitting your site to Google works but usually takes a number of days to be indexed. For timely indexing by search engines, a better idea is to get your site linked with another popular site in a relevant niche.
9. Allow Incoming Links – Quality incoming links will improve your site’s search engine placement. If your site has quality content that is informative and useful to users, let other, good relevant sites link to you.
10. URL Consistency – Use or drop the ‘www’ and stick to it. www.abc and abc.com will be taken as two sites with similar content by search engines, and this doesn’t scale to well with them.

Website design is not about displaying your creative skills exclusively, but it also demands for a right balance of logic and practical approaches to attract more visitors. While for many designers and content writers, on page SEO is an evil barrier to their effective content strategy, but as a professional it is important that you understand the significance of SEO and how it can enhance a visitor’s experience.

Change Your SEO opinion

It’s time that you get updated about the new trends in SEO and change your conventional perceptions that keyword stuffing, stilted words and linking are the best effective tactics of SEO. The scenario of web industry has changed for better with Google and SEO coming a long way since the days of those practices.

Google has designed and trained its spiders to think and work like humans, thus ensuring that best meaningful contents highlighted instead of those that try to game the system with user friendly content tricks. Here in this article we have tried to bring for you seven tips about on page SEO that will help you build a highly effective site that is solid and SEO friendly:

1. Use of Primary Keyword Phrases at the Beginning

To avail maximum benefit of SEO techniques, use the primary keyword of your website, i.e. the main topic of the page, at the beginning of the heading title. Google rewards web pages that use its prime keywords in the headline, thus helping readers to find their needful easily.

2. Bold Text Usage for Keywords

Using bold text for keywords is a successful practice that helps both search engines and users to find contents that are relevant and important. It is a good discipline to attract the focus of readers and search engines to the main theme of a web page. But make sure that you do not use too much bold text, as it tends to confuse a reader.

3. Use of Bullets

Using bulleted lists in your webpage content is another effective practice that can help you enjoy beneficial results. It is observed that search engines consider bulleted contents with higher importance, and it is equally applicable with readers as bullets makes readability easier and effortless for them.

4. Keyword Usage in Call to Action Links

Linking relevant keywords with related webpages makes another useful SEO tips that helps alert the reader as well as search engine about the content of the new page. Allow your readers know about the content of the webpage with help of link using keywords so that they can enjoy better navigational experience.

5. Primary Keywords at the Beginning of Meta Titles

Many designers remain indifferent about the meta title of a webpage but as they believe readers don’t see it in general. But as a professional it is important to know that the title tag of a webpage plays a significant role in determining its success in search engines. It not only helps understand the subject or topic of the webpage but also improves the readability of web content.

6. Strong Internal Link

Interconnection of links in webpages makes the new trend in search engine optimization that is making it big in the market. You need to link different web pages in a logical manner so that it becomes easier for readers to search and navigate. Moreover, it also helps in SEO as search engines give more importance and weightage to webpages that exhibit strong internal links.

7. Optimization of Site Images

To avail the best SEO results for your website, optimizing the site images also make an essential need. If the website images are not upto the standard of good usability, you may miss out on good opportunities. Follow the following three guidelines to optimize the site images for better visitor experience:

• Use the Alt attribute for image to convey data and information
• Use keyword in the image title for better optimization
• Make the caption of the image optimized with help of relevant keywords

The difference is slowly fading away, as the two worlds – SEO and Web Design are gradually getting merged, and thereby setting a new trend. No doubt, it is terrific news for SEO professionals, but at the same time, it is giving website designers sleepless nights, as they will have to work their fingers to the bone to make a website both search engine friendly and user friendly. Here we are going to share some popular tactics that you can employ to increase online visibility of your website without making any kind of compromise on the graphical front:

Sparing Use of Call To action: – There is no point in making your visitors confused with an overwhelming number of Call-to-Action buttons or texts. This is ridiculous and it does not serve any useful purpose. You can check out some famous websites such as reuters.com or nytimes.com as reference. They use it at the end of articles and the result is satisfying.

This is a good tactic for increasing the number of page views, and if the Lady Luck favors you, conversion rate can shot up significantly.

Design that Connects: – As a designer, your sole objective is to strike a perfect note with the viewers. Do not try to sing a different tune, as visitors may not find your design interesting. If you can somehow manage to get connected to your targeted visitors, chances are that they may link back to you or spread your message. In short, give your visitors reason to spend some quality time on your website.

Creative and Search Engine Friendly: – Probably you have experienced this thing hundreds of time while browsing net. Sometimes, you just chanced on a website that looks truly impressive but with almost zero search engine visibility. However, thankfully, these websites are fast becoming things of past as a new breed of websites has born, and they are all equally impressive and search engine friendly.

User Badges: – If you wish to encourage visitor interaction in your website, you can let your visitors use badge or you can dole out some points. It will definitely inspire them to spread your message far and wide. By encouraging participation, you can give your brand presence a boost.

The Animated HTML Multiheader: – Use of multiheader is fast becoming a rage in the website design industry. It helps you to feature different things in the home page and it is compelling too. Just make sure that all the headers are visible to search engine. Why should you use multi-headers? Well, the reasons are obvious. It comes with two-fold benefits. Firstly, you need not have to concentrate on other internal pages for communicating your message to your targeted audience. Secondly, if people start linking to you, your home will get the maximum number of linkback.

Use of Infographics: – This is another trend that is smeared in controversy. Some people lauded it and some lambasted it. The good thing about Infographics is that, it can make your website look truly different. It might help you to get some natural links but you cannot deny the fact that it is not an ideal practice from search engine’s point of view.

A search engine friendly and user-friendly website is an asset of an organization since it can help an organization to get better exposure in the virtual world. But making a website search engine friendly is not everyone’s cup of tea. Unless you have a fair level of authority on search engine optimization, you might find it overwhelmingly difficult to design an SEO friendly website. Having a good website is certainly an advantage but you need to master the art of drawing traffic to your website by making your website visible to search engine and that should be done from the initial stages of the website design. Here in this article, we have discussed some of the golden rules of SEO website design:

Make It Light: Google has already made it clear that it will eliminate those websites, which take awfully long time to load. So, it is clear that you need to improve page speed of your website at any cost if you do not want your website to be knocked out Google or any other search engines. Moreover, users usually avoid those websites that take long time to process a request.

Avoid Java Script: – Google and other search other search engines cannot read JavaScript and that means, you need to avoid this script in a website as far as possible. Try to use it sparingly or at the footer section of the website to have minimal impacts on the visibility of a website in major search engines. Do not embed text in the Java Script because Google will never be able to read it or index that text.

Use Text In the Flash: – Until a few days ago Google was unable to read or crawl anything that is embedded in a flash file i.e. SWF file. But the scenario has changed a lot recently. Google crawler is now powerful enough to read texts of a flash file. Therefore, if you are designing a flash website, you need to use as many texts in the flash file as possible to get better exposure in different search queries.

Do Not Use Inline CSS: – Use of CSS has become a common practice among website designers and developers since it offers a number of advantages and amazing flexibility. But you should not use Inline CSS instead you should create a separate CSS file that should be linked with the HTML page.

Do Not Use Too Many Images: – Never use too many images in a website. You can make a website light by using gradient instead. Try not to use textures if you can manage without them.

Do Not Use Frame: – Frame website design has long become a passé. Frame websites have a peculiar structure, and they fetch information from internal files and that means a sizeable section of the website will remain invisible from search engines:

Give Proper Names To Images: It is quite common among website design to name images as: image01, image02 etc. But if you want to make your website more relevant to search engine, you need to give them proper names such as websitedesign-footer, web-design-header etc.

These are some of the tips that you can try to increase the visibility of your website a bit further.