OntoSearch

When you design a web web site, it’s straightforward to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you’re going to have yet another type of visitor with a completely distinct agenda: they’re not going to be searching at your pretty logo and they’re not going to be passing judgement on your background color. What they’re looking for is the content and structure of your page.

They’re the search engine spiders, and they are in control of most likely the largest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your website to be profitable. Here’s how.

Make Your Structure Clear.

Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard methods: you want it to be extremely clear to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation initial in your page. Constantly use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.

Stay away from using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every ‘semantic’ HTML tag that applies to your content. If you’re quoting an individual, use the block quote tag; if you’re posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.

Keep Keywords Consistent.

It’s not typically worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking – the engines have pretty significantly wised up to this tactic – but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they happen naturally. For example, for these articles, I have stuck with ‘website’ throughout, as suddenly writing ‘web site’ instead would bring down my rankings.

HTML and Javascript.

It’s worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don’t, in general, read Javascript. That indicates that making use of Javascript to insert text into your page is a bad thought if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you may possibly want to have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page with [removed] this will tend to make your page appear more focused, despite the fact that you must be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.

Use Meta Tags.

Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any far more when it comes to ranking your site, but they’re still crucial in one way: the meta description tag is still usually used to decide what text search engines’ users see when they find your internet site in their outcomes! This can be just as essential as the ranking itself – write some thing here that will look useful to the searcher, and you’re much more likely to get them to click-by way of. Do not forget that, although search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human choice: to click, or not to click?

Stay away from Splash Pages.

You might feel it’s a great thought to have a ‘splash’ page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every single user who arrives at your website, but search engines actually hate that. Utilizing this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would normally be, so you ought to avoid it – it’s annoying to visitors anyway.

Include Alt Tags.

Any time you use a graphic, consist of alt text for it – specifically if there is text in the graphic. Keep in mind that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn’t, then you’ll be turning search engines away.

Finally, Write Excellent Content.

The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have least control over) is how several people determine to link to your page from their page. How can you make much more individuals link to you? Make your content helpful. Make it some thing they’ll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it’s ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content really stand out.