5 Tips to Build a SEO - Friendly Web Design

A well-designed website with no search engine exposure will not benefit your business. SEO or search engine optimization is the bed rock of online marketing. The purpose of your website is an online marketing brochure that sells your product or service. But in order for your website to deliver the results, you must drive targeted traffic to your website. And the best way to get targeted traffic to your website is to implement SEO.

SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your website from search engines via natural search result listings. Typically, the earlier your site appears in the search results list, the more visitors your will receive from the search engine.

Before you can implement SEO, your website must be SEO-friendly. Here are 5 tips to build a SEO-friendly web design:

1. Do not build a Flash website. Search engines cannot understand a website that is built entirely on Flash technology. When search engines cannot understand what your website is about, you are not going to achieve high rankings on the search result pages. Build a HTML website that search engines can understand. If you want your website to be interactive, you can include a flash banner on it.

2. Clean coding. When the designer slices your website, make sure that the coding is clean and simple. When the coding is too complicated, search engines cannot read it easily.

3. Use search engine friendly URLs. An example of a search engine friendly URL is "search-engine-optimization.html". Use a hyphen instead of underscore to separate each word in the naming conventions. You may come across sites that have URL that looks like this: "index.php/?id=20&product=1&cat=5". Search engines cannot understand this kind of URL and this will affect the performance of your SEO effort.

4. Tag your pages with important keywords. Important keywords must be placed in your Title, Meta, H1 and ALT tags. You should conduct a keyword research and find out what your prospects are using to search for your product or service. These are the keywords that you should optimize for. You should place the more important keywords at the front of the tags.

5. Write good and relevant content. Content is king when it comes to SEO. Search engines give what searchers are looking for. If you do not have keyword-optimized content, it is very hard for your website to rank high on search engines. When you are doing the copywriting, make sure that you don't stuff too many keywords in it.

These are just some of the tips to design a SEO-friendly website. Bear these tips in mind when you create or revamp your website.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing web design services.

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