Website Design

After you have done keyword research, mapping your chosen search terms to content is the first task in translating keyword research into site design. Search engine friendly design requires proper keyword placement within the site that will deliver searchers to the best landing page for their specific search queries.

Using the homepage to target very specific search terms is the easiest way with new websites / in the beginning but as you improve the link popularity of your site, it's usually best to target more generic searches with the homepage and to move those search terms onto the appropriate landing pages. Your keyword strategy will evolve over time as it depends upon which pages you use to target different search terms.

All of the site's content must be accessible by human visitors and spiders within three mouse clicks from the homepage. Your site's internal linking structure influences the search engine rankings of individual pages in subtle ways.

A typical website has a homepage, category pages, product / service pages, support pages and information pages.

The homepage provides clear paths by which any visitor may find the information he or she seeks. The search terms that describe the general focus of the site are used on the homepage. Searchers who combine two or more generic search terms are likely to land on the homepage so it is not the ideal landing page for very specific search terms.

Category pages are used to target visitors who are either gathering information or comparing alternatives. Use more specific terms than those on the homepage.

Product / service pages are dedicated to specific product / service offerings.

Product or service pages should by keyword-rich.

Information Pages are the supplemental pages that support the website's selling or educating process and provide more detailed information, comparisons, feature lists etc.

Information pages are a great place to bring searchers who are in the information gathering or comparison mode.

Support Pages include contact pages, support material, documentation, Fans and site maps.

Crawl ability (how accessible the site's pages are to search engine spiders) and Site Navigation are two important aspects of search engine friendly design.

Any page that's indexed by a search engine might become a landing page for a searcher.

Good search engine friendly design makes it easy for the search engine spiders.

Solving a site's crawl ability issues will allow search engines to find all of the site's important content. Ensure that the same content is never accessible through more than one URL. When a spider believes that it's being given duplicate content, it may stop crawling and flag the site as unreliable.

Site Navigation (how accessible the rest of the site is to visitors who enter through any of its landing pages). No matter where a visitor lands, you want to guide them back into your site's sales funnel.

Your websites has to work for human visitors.

It's easy for a visitor to find their way to other pages on the site from the homepage, category and product pages because these pages are always fully integrated with the site navigation system.

Information and support pages also attract clicks, as long as these pages are part of the overall navigation scheme, although these kinds of pages are not designed as entry pages and are intended to be destinations. Information pages are often implemented as pop-up windows keep visitors on the product / service pages, while providing answers to their more specific questions. Make pop-up windows crawl able to ensure that visitors arriving at those pages from search engines can navigate to the rest of the site.

Don't forget to run your pages through an HTML validate to eliminate any obvious errors.

Errors in your HTML code can have a huge affect on the search engine spiders.

So be careful to make sure your pages are clean before the spiders see them.

Browsers are very forgiving with common problems such as extra tags and tags that aren't closed, but the search spiders to choke. Extra title-tags may be interpreted as Spam. Don't overload the alt attribute of image tags with keywords, it's intended to offer a text alternative if the user can't see the image.