March 6, 2009

How You Can Integrate Web Design and SEO

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is one of the your most important tools for generating traffic to promote your website. SEO enables you to create organic avenues of traffic to your website, reduce your advertising costs, and increasing your conversions. One of the key aspects of search engine optimization is keyword density, a quantitative measurement that every major search engine takes into account when assigning page rank.

The place to start finding the balance between appearance and performance is SEO. If you never generate traffic, your beautiful page design will never be appreciated. The essentials of SEO include keyword density, linking between pages, meta tags, and proper tagging of images. Each of these factors is something to consider as you begin designing your site.

If you like this article see more here: keyword suggestion

Every site has to have enough text to allow for appropriately low keyword density. Unlike the standards of the 1990s, modern search algorithms penalize sites, and sometimes penalize them severely, for cramming too many search terms, or even words that look like search terms, into too little text. Your content has to be long enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to captivate your visitors. This also means it is not possible to put every screen shot or image you might happen to have, no matter how attractive they are, on every page. The search engines have no way to index images. Words, not images, drive SEO. That is why every website designer has to give every site multiple pages with text that can be optimized.

The next step in integrating web design and SEO is to tag all each image on the site with the "alt" tag in HTML. Every image has to have this tag. The "alt" tag enables to instruct the web browser as to which text will pop up when visitors run their mouse over your image. Every image also requires an SEO-friendly title. For instance if your site is about sunning on the beach in Aruba, and you want to use a photo of a beach on your page, a name like aruba.beach.wow.jpg isfar more effective than an name like 477876arub9wow.jpg. Keywords in your tags become keywords for your pages. Just take care not make your pages too keyword-dense with image names, either.

Another key step in search engine optimization is including links between the pages of your site. Visitors appreciate internal navigation. The websites also appreciate internal navigation, because these links are places you can place keywords that identify your pages. For instance, if you have a page called "Dolphins in Belize," you can link to that page from every other page in your site with a link entitled "Dolphins in Belize." This way you not only signal the search engines that you have created a page, but you tell them what the page is about.

The ultimate rule for integrating page design and SEO Keep it simple! Use flash only sparingly. Shun excessive images. Avoid complex design. Paying attention to these important rules will boost your freedom to do SEO. You don't have to make your website anything other than attractive, you just need to do more with less.

Always take care that the search engines do not mistake your content for spam. Beyond keeping within the 7% limit, your respect for your readers and your providing genuinely content will make all the difference in how well your site will perform.

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