Website SEO Tips
Website Design Guidelines
 The Website designer
needs to work closely with the Copywriter and the Graphic artist to ensure that
the Website is attractive and has a good Ranking.
Here are some design guidelines for a Website:
- Set the width of the Web Page so that visitors never have to scroll sideways.
- The size of the Web Page, including Images, should be less than 40 KB. The ideal
size is less than 20k.
- Each Web page should have a descriptive name containing relevant Keywords. Each
word contained in the name should be separated by a hyphen (-). If the URL is in
a hyperlink, the anchor text should inform the visitor of the link contents. The
URL also appears in the Search Results and will be in bold if a Keyword is found.
- Despite the advances in CSS, Tables are still the easiest way to align columns.
However, don't use Tables within Tables within Tables. Search Engines have difficulties
with complex structures.
- Use CSS to ensure that all links are consistently styled and stand out from the
regular text.
- The CSS Stylesheet file size should be minimised to reduce initial load times.
- Using the bold <b> tag around some of the keywords on each page may help.
Two or three times per page is quite sufficient.
- Put relevant descriptions in all anchor hyperlinks
- Some technology can confuse the Search Engine spiders. Frames, CGI scripts, image
maps, etc may be ignored by the spiders.
- All Websites should have an up-to-date Sitemap. The Sitemap must reside in the root
folder.
- For ASP.Net, it is essential to set strict="true" and explicit="true" in the web.config
file. This will minimise problems with Visual Basic code.
- Statistical Analyses of visitor activity is essential. See
Website Activity
Tracking,
Visitor Statistics
and
Website Statistics.
- Google advises that there should be a different Meta Description for each Web page.
Using ASP.Net and Master pages, only a common Meta Description tag will be created.
It is possible to have a different Meta Description for each page – see
Specifying the Title, Meta Tags, and Other HTML Headers in the Master Page.
- Search Engines may ignore links in JavaScript code. If the JavaScript code in the
page is too large, the spider may skip the Website entirely.
- Store Images in their own folder.
- Avoid using Flash. Search Engines have problems reading it.
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