Search engine optimization

What search engine optimization means and what I can do for your web site's better ranking

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:08:30 +0200

Having your new beautiful website ready and online does not mean that the job is finished. You might have the best web site in the world, but if people don't find it's pretty useless. People find the information they look for in the Internet by several ways, the most popular one is by using Search Engines like Google.

Search engine optimization (or SEO) is a process of using tools and techniques to improve the rank of a website in the search results and to get your web site in a better position, which takes serious planning and a lot of work. Therefore this is a time consuming process.

It's the goal of Google and every other search engine to provide with the most appropriate web pages for particular keywords. So the process of search engine optimization is to make a web page as relevant as possible for that keyword.

As a web designer I design and programme websites with constantly search engines optimization rules in mind. Here is what I can do for you:

Keyword research

Before I start the design for your website, I would do a research for keywords to find the most appropriate keywords for your industry and location. These are the search terms that receive the most search engine traffic with the least number of competing web pages. This gives us the best chance to build a web page relevant enough to rank well in the search results.

Creating a certain percentage of keyword density in your web page content is one of
the oldest techniques in SEO. As search engine crawlers and spiders assign significant weightage on number of occurrence of a particular keyword in a page while ranking a particular website, people have always emphasized on usage of keywords in their content development process.

In simpler terms, a keyword is the preferred word of the users, when they perform a
search activity. As search engines pick up the relevant web pages based on the keywords searched by the surfers, they display the matching web pages, keywords play a vital role in SERP.

As soon as you decide your website objectives, you will then need to research what
keyword phrases or sentences a surfer might use to find you, these will become your keywords to place inside your website content.

Website layout techniques

Standards compliant website design. Block elements CSS positioned layouts with source ordered content. Hand coded websites. All the forward-thinking web design and development techniques I use to create your website also give you an edge in SEO. Search engine optimization is literally built into your website.

Tags and content

I target one or two vulnerable keywords with each page of your website. Where appropriate, I use those keywords in the title tag, meta tags, heading tags, image alt tags, URL, and content of the web page. The point is to let search engines know that your page is relevant for those keywords. I would never use keyword stuffing or other not allowed search engine techniques that could penalize your website. (Keyword stuffing is excessive use of a keyword on a page, putting keywords in meta tags that don't appear in the content of a web page, or hiding keywords on a page so they're visible to search engines but not to your visitors.)

An image means thousand words...

...but from Search Engine Optimization and Web Usability Optimization stand points the things don't stay exactly at this stage. Many designers tend to use a lot of images in their designs which is especially wrong when speaking about well search engine optimized web menu tabs and titles. These are the most important keywords of your web page and they should be plain text represented even if the graphic design suffers a bit from that.

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file.xml that contains links to every page on your website, formated in a specific way. I would create and submit your XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Site Explorer, and MSN's Webmaster Center so your website is crawled as quickly as possible.

What I offer is a manually coded, well designed website that's created from start to finish with search engine optimization as a primary goal. And I know you'll appreciate the results. Contact me now to discuss your web design project.