Basic SEO Tips for Web Designers

SEO or search engine optimization can start on the design phase of the website. Usually some web designers neglect these basic issues involving relationship of SEO and the structure of the site.

The following are the basic SEO tips intended for web designers who want to provide a SEO-friendly website and those who wants to learn SEO from the design stage of the web development:

1. Make a unique title for each pages of the web. If you are developing  a customized CMS (content management systems), make sure that it has an option that let the user of the CMS change the individual title of each pages of the site. The usual place where search engines take the keyword to rank for your site is the title.

2. Fill-up the meta description and meta keywords of each pages. Make sure each pages contains different description relevant to the content of the pages. Duplicate pages are sometimes not indexed properly by search engines.

3. Avoid all graphics or images for the whole design of the site. Search engines can’t read text from graphics or pictures. Try to use small sized graphics preferrably .JPG because of its high compression.

4. If you will use images, fill-up the ALT property of the IMG tag with a description of the text. This increases the visibility of images in image search which is another good source of traffic.

5. If your site will be a full flash or half flash-half static/dynamic HTML, use text object in flash movie during its development instead of graphics object. Google can read text object from flash files (.SWF) but not graphics object.

6. Use descriptive name for filenames on the pages of the site. For example, www.bleuken.com/basic-seo-tips/ is better compared to www.bleuken.com/?p=1102

7. If you are using a drop down menu or navigation menu written in full Javascript or image, make sure it has a normal text link equivalent on the page (usually placed on the footer). Links created by Javascript are not followed by search engines and other pages have lower chance of getting indexed.

8. Provide a HTML sitemap containing links of all the pages of the site and make sure this sitemap file is accessible in normal text link on the homepage.

This list can be used as a basic checklist and basis on preparing an initial structure analysis report for any website to check for any SEO issue. I hope this basic tips help web designers in building a SEO-ready and friendly web design.