Search Engine Friendly Web Design

Building a successful website is about more than simply slapping up a few pages and hoping for traffic. If you want to gain the attention of web surfers and search engines alike, you need to take the time to carefully construction a search engine friendly website.

Most of the top ranking websites on the internet today are the products of hours of time and dedication. Many webmasters opt to take advantage of free SEO analysis services, and many utilize the services of SEO firms to become successful. Either way, there are several things you need to know in order to design a properly formatted website.

The Components of a Good SEO Website

Successful websites have two main audiences – individuals searching the web and the search engines themselves. The websites that are good at gaining the attention of both of these difficult-to-please audiences all have several components in common. They include, but certainly are not limited to:

Properly formatted HTML coding
Unique content rich with keywords and phrases
File names that contain keywords
Properly formatted sitemaps that update automatically
Creatively designed 404 error pages
Eye appeal

Web Design Techniques to Avoid

If you want your website to be attractive to the search engines, there are a few things that you should avoid as well. These include, but are not limited to:

Including automatically loading music files
Creating splash pages
Using flash animation
Using fonts that are too fancy, or too small for the average reader
A layout that mandates horizontal scrolling

Some of these functions, to web designers, seem fun and engaging, but they are difficult for search engine crawlers to read and understand. If the search engine crawlers can’t interpret the information on your site, they’ll simply work past it without indexing your pages.

Features that cause your visitors to take extra steps before reaching your homepage are a virtual no-no as well. Clicking through splash pages and scrolling to read text can quickly become annoying – causing your visitors to abandon your site in search of an easier-to-navigate source of information.

Keep your website design simple. You can create a gorgeous website with simple navigation tools, great content, and internal linking. The search engines will love you – and so will your visitors!