10 Crucial Seo Considerations For Designing Your Web Site

By Author: Gary Klingsheim
Total Articles: 4762
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First rule of SEO (Search Engine Optimization): It evolves. Getting your site to the top of the search engine results pages is a work in progress and always will be. It was not that long ago that all the optimization most people did was filling in a few meta tags while building a site. Today the list of SEO considerations for designing your Web site is a lot longer. In fact, a few sites claim there are 95, or 101, or even more SEO tips and tricks. While there are many items and aspects to good SEO, there are 10 major considerations that you should think through when designing your site from the start.

Again, you can find a list that is a lot longer, but if it does not have the following considerations, it is not a complete one. That said, here are 10 crucial SEO considerations for designing your Web site:

1. Create excellent content

You've doubtless heard that content is king. It is also queen, prince and sergeant-at-arms. It is, to be precise, the single most important thing. You can fill it full of keywords to the nth degree, but if the content is boring and useless (or even entertaining, but useless), ...
... it will have limited value for people and they won't be at your site long enough, or often enough, for search engines to consider your site valuable.

2. Create unique content

In this plagiarism-savvy business, you will not get away with borrowing, or stealing, someone else's copy and content. It won't do you much good, anyway, as your site will be rated, essentially, on how useful visitors find it, and they won't find boring, regurgitated content useful at all.

3. Continue to add new content

There is a reliability and trustworthiness factor on the Web that increases with the amount of relevant content, and the regularity (and continuity) of this factors in strongly. Stale content will drag you down.

Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.

4. Make sure your site is widely accessible

Accessible HTML will ensure that your content is readable by both screen readers and search engine spiders. The more accessible your pages are, the easier it is for the search engines to find, read and rank them.

5. Use a powerful keyword phrase

From the very beginning of the design phase of every page, you should be working on a great keyword phrase for it. Although some may recommend optimizing your entire site to a single keyword phrase, experience has shown that developing design and copy for pages with specific keywords and/or phrases is the better route.

6. Choose a popular phrase, but not worn out

It may seem counterintuitive to say that you shouldn't use the most popular phrase, but extremely common (and popular) keywords and phrases are overused and the scramble to rank with them is highly competitive. Think of it this way: You will obtain a higher number of page views from less popular keywords if you're listed on the first or second page of search engine results, than you will from popular ones that only get you to page 22.

7. Consider a domain with a keyword or phrase

Obviously, having your keyword or phrase in the domain name is a powerful means of optimizing for them.

8. Put the keyword or phrase in your URL

If you can't figure out how to put your keywords in the domain name, insert them into URLs. Search engines will read those URLs and determine a value for the content in them, as well.

9. Don't forget the title tag

As one of the very important tags for your Web page, the title tag should be a top candidate for keywords, too. Putting keywords and/or phrases there, at the beginning if possible, is essential for getting the phrase into search engines. This will also make your keyword phrase a link in search engine indexes.

10. Use, but don't overuse, the words and phrases

There are a lot of different opinions about keyword density, but the consensus is that it should be from 3 to 7 percent for the primary keywords or phrase, and perhaps 1 to 2% for your secondary ones.

Other considerations

Despite content being king (at least, if not emperor), designing a site also involves graphic elements, coding in the back end, linking to other sites, etc. There are SEO considerations for everything that goes into creating your Web site. The fact that the text in a Flash animation, after years of promises, may actually be readable by search engines without jumping through hoops, is a great advance. How it eventually works, of course, remains to be seen. This just amplifies the point that SEO considerations are a moving target. It is best that you stay moving, too, to keep abreast of all the SEO-and-design factors that can affect your site and its rankings.
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Moonrise Productions is a custom web design company specializing in custom web development and design. Whether you need social network web design or web programming, contact us and we'll get it done right.