OntoSearch

When you design a web site, it’s simple to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realize, though, is that you’re going to have another kind 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 judgment 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 almost certainly the largest section of your traffic. You want to please these spiders if you want your internet site to be profitable. Here’s how.

Make Your Structure Clear.

Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard techniques: 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 first in your page. Often use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.

Prevent using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user by way of CSS font sizes: instead, use every single ‘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 normally worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking – the engines have pretty a lot wised up to this tactic – but do make certain 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 do not, in general, read JavaScript. That indicates that making use of JavaScript to insert text into your page is a bad concept if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you may well 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 far 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 a lot more when it comes to ranking your web site, but they’re still essential in 1 way: the Meta description tag is still frequently utilized to decide what text search engines’ users see when they discover your internet site in their outcomes! This can be just as important as the ranking itself – write some thing here that will look helpful to the searcher, and you’re a lot more likely to get them to click-via. Don’t forget that, even though search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human choice: to click, or not to click?

Avoid Splash Pages.

You may think it’s a fantastic notion to have a ‘splash’ page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines genuinely hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would typically be, so you need to steer clear of it – it’s annoying to visitors anyway.

Contain Alt Tags.

Any time you use a graphic, contain alt text for it – specially 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 massive black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains reasonably intact. If it doesn’t, then you’ll be turning search engines away.

Finally, Write Wonderful Content.

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