5 Basic SEO Tips

March 29, 2011

Designing a great website is only the beginning of becoming successful online. Your site must be search engine friendly to ensure people see it. There are basic SEO principles to take into consideration as well as good content development practices.

Here are 5 things to consider for SEO in your next design.

1. Is your navigation search engine friendly?

Flash navigation? This may be a problem, unless you are aware of how to make Flash objects web-crawler-friendly. Search engines find it difficult to crawl websites using Flash.

2. Is your JavaScript separate from your HTML document?

It is important to keep both JavaScript and CSS documents external from your HTML. Including them in your HTML can add additional lines of code, generally ahead of content, slowing crawlers down. Search engines like to access website content as quickly as possible.

3. Is content readable by search engine spiders?

Content must be well structured, considering headings, paragraphs and links. If your site has little content it could struggle in the search results. Good planning in the design process will help prevent this issue. Avoid using images for text.

4. Are your URLs search friendly?

To create good URLs include keywords that help describe the content of the page. Some CMS’s automatically generate numbers/code for page URL’s, so be careful of this and customise your website URL’s appropriately.

5. Have you blocked pages you don’t want search engines to index?

Your site may include pages you don’t want search engines to index, as they add no value to content e.g. server-side scripts. Including pages of no importance could dilute your contents density resulting in negative effects on our sites search rank. To prevent pages from being indexed by search spiders use a robots.txt file.

Having considered and applied these 5 things you are ready to consider 5 more. To improve your search rankings further read our next post ‘Another 5 SEO tips’.