Back to Basics: 13 Things to Know SEOwise as a Web Designer

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important things to consider when starting your new website. Yes, color, aesthetics and ease of navigation are all very important, but nothing is as important as traffic being able to find your site. SEO means plugging in to what search engine sites, such as Yahoo and Google, use to index and find your site when a person searches a certain topic.

With SEO being so important, here are thirteen (muhaha, a scary number) things we tend to forget from an SEO perspective when building a website.

1. Stuffing Important Content in Flash is Bad
Flash is an amazing piece of software that enhances fascinating interactive sites but unfortunately Google and Yahoo search engines do not really like Flash. Adding SEO to a Flash-based site can be done, but it is difficult, expensive and it is hard to find people who know how to do it. Putting important information and text inside of Flash will result in nothing, more than likely it will not be indexed properly.

2. Trim Down and Get Rid of Useless Code

You will want to go through your site and clean up and delete all unwanted code. Dreamweaver is finally falling by the wayside and reducing the number of badly coded sites. And today there is much simpler code that has been created and is available from a number of third party software developers and/or as freeware. Unnecessary code slows down search engines and can scare a bot away from your site.

3. Use Keywords Wisely
It is worth putting time into thinking about what SEO keywords best reflect your site. Search engines search each and every site from the top of the code down. Words that reflect you and your site better should be at the top. And do not go stuffing keywords. Have you seen a web designer’s site that had pages for "Web Designer Kentucky, Web Designer KY, Web Designer Louisville, Web Designer Derby," etc, etc? This is a type of stuffing, don’t do it as neither your visitors nor the search engines like it.

4. Get a Good Domain Name

Choosing a friendly web address is critical. If you can get a domain name that includes one of your chosen SEO keywords then you are in great shape. You are probably thinking that all the good domain names are taken but that is not necessarily true, get creative and create a domain that you know will attract people. It also does not hurt to have a domain name that is easy to spell and is catchy enough to remember.

5. Use "No Archive" and "No Index" Tags When Necessary
Not everything on your site needs to be indexed. Things like contact information pages or privacy policy pages can be left out of search results. Make sure you add the appropriate code so that pages that do not need to be indexed are marked as such. This will speed up the indexing process and also bump you higher up in the results. Remember the faster you can be found and indexed, the more likely it is that you will appear in the top results.

6. Study Other Sites

Take a look at other sites and see how they are constructed. Try doing a search yourself for a site that might be similar to yours. If there is no other site like yours on the web, you shouldn’t have any trouble ranking high with search engines for your keywords. Otherwise, search for whatever service or product you are selling on the web and see what comes up first. A good web designer will be able to deconstruct and reverse engineer the site and offer you some great advice and tips for your new site.

Get Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools to monitor your site. There are other providers out there, equally good and even better, but these two are the bare minimum.

7. Make Sure You Link Internally
If you have old content on your site, especially old blog posts, chances are they are not being crawled as often as newer pages. Create internal links from some of the new posts back to your old posts. It can be as simple as: The first five posts of My Blog, a walk down Memory Lane. Because you wrote a new post describing these five posts and link internally to them, the crawler will follow those links to the old posts. Otherwise, internally link with related posts or materials to help keep all pages on your site actively crawled.

8. Use the Alt Tags For Images
Yes, there is a reason that the alt tag exists for images so use it. This helps when browser do not load images but the person reading the page can read a description of the photo. Alt tags also help in image searching. Short, sweet tags are the best.

9. No Cheating or Copying from other Sites
Honestly, it is so dumb to say it, but I have to. Copying content, paragraphs in whole, images, from any other site is BAD BAD BAD. Why am I emphasizing this? Because there are a lot of new so called design resource sites that are just ripping off materials. You may get a good Page Rank but eventually you will crash. It’s not only bad for SEO, it’s also unethical.

10. Write Friendly, Targeted Titles

Every post or page needs to have a Title, Meta Description, and Meta Tags. Meta tags are the least important, but list four to five words that are themes of the article. Meta descriptions are important for search engine results, it’s what the user sees when your pages pop ups in the results page. Descriptions should be limited to 150 (some say 160) characters, otherwise your description will end with an ellipses. Lastly, the title tag is the most important one; it should be no more that 65 characters and succinctly describe your article.

A couple notes, the WordPress platform is not SEO friendly and you need a plugin, All in One Seo, to help. If you are coding on different platform the tag box below should appear on every page of your site.

11. Create Canonical URLs
Having problems with duplicate content on your site? A canonical tag can help you fix that and it’s a new, yummy goodie from Google.

Add this tag to the header area of the pages that are non-canonical.

12. Keep the Links to Under 100
On an article post, links can easily spiral out of control. Not including nofollow links, a page can have a long blogroll (lots of links), social media links (even more links), and just random external links. Keep your blogroll to a minimum, 15-20 sites. Besides, will your visitors really be visiting all those blogs? Social media links, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble, etc., can also be no followed because really, you don’t need to pass on any page rank. And if you have 30-40 of these social media icons, just tone them to the five most useful ones for your site because your visitors will be confused seeing too many options.

13. WWW or Not: Choose One

Go with www or without www in your domain and all urls; do not have some pages that are using it and some not using it. Sticking to one way will keep a clear structure and ensure your SEO value and links direct to one page only instead of variations.

As web designers, you need to not only create pretty websites, but you need to create pretty code. The more you adhere to web standards, clean coding, and basic SEO techniques, the easier it is for a website to get more traffic via search engines and be read by bots.