For all the designers out there, here are some simple steps to consider when designing a website that is search engine friendly.

Step 1: Less Images and More Text
Only a few search engines out there have the ability to read and understand images. A lot of designers make the mistake of turning important text into images, such as titles or keywords. Mostly they do this to direct a visitor’s focus to a specific area. In this case, it’s always better to put CSS to good use. If you need to use an image, make sure to include alt attributes.

Step 2: External CSS and JavaScript Files
On-page CSS and JavaScript often hinder a search engine’s ability to analyze your site because it makes the web pages heavier, pushing the vital content further down. Make sure search engines get a clean and clear passage to your content.

Step 3: Push Important Links Up
Footer links and site-wide links have somewhat lost their importance over the years when it comes to search engines. Try adding more links to internal pages from the main content of your website.

Step 4: Straight to the Content
Splash pages are justified in only a very few cases. Websites place a big image on their home page and ask the visitors to click on the image to enter the website. Search engines target home page for vital content. If your home page doesn’t have any content, it could leave your website out of search engine results.

Step 5: No Flash
Content and Less Ajax
Flash designs are extremely popular these days. They look and feel great and can easily communicate with your target market. Unfortunately, search engines don’t read flash sites. Go ahead and add flash to your site, just avoid having a design that is completely flash. The same rule applies to Ajax.

Step 6: KISS
KISS is the best design strategy for any aspect of your website because it helps both visitors and search engines to get the best results from your website. Both people and search engines scan through the content of your website looking for the most important information. The faster they can find it, the better off you will be.

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-tips-for-designers-2140350.html

SEO TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR RANKINGS

I would like to share with you a few tips to make your site seo friendly and to score better with no minimum seo skills on your end. Positioning on search engines can rely exclusively but not wholly to a few critical factors known as onsite (internal seo) and offsite (external seo). Internal SEO can be all the content your website contains from navigation building, text, images, layout, structure and more) Below are a few factors that can help your site to score better with no minimum seo skills on your end.

Keyword selection and research

Take all the time available to research for all your keywords and phrases to use for your SEO campaign; keywords that best describes your area of business, products/services you are trying to promote.

Amount of text per page

Search Engines love pages with a broad content. A website with a long text content and information is in a good chance to get a better ranking than a competitor website with poor content. It is best advised that you can increase your content and text up to 2000 words per page. Write as much as you can about your business, services and use at least 3-4 times the keywords that you are targeting.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a combination of the number of times a keyword or a phrase appears on your page. The more times the keyword is repeated on your page, the more will its density will be. In a 100 word content, a keyword that repeats 6 times counts 6% in density. The less the density is means that search engine will ignore the term in a search on the particular keyword or phrase. It is best advised to keep your keyword density between 5-7%. Anything over can flag as spam, best known as keyword stuffing

Title and “Alt” Tags in images

When it comes to images used in your website, search engines do not have the ability to read images so it is very important to keep a clear and descriptive title on all your images used in your website, typically in a one sentence of 20-30 characters if possible.

Use text for navigation

As i previously said, search engines do not have the ability to read image content to your website. If your navigation menu consists of images for any reason, search engines will not be able to index the text used on images and it’s links. It is best advised to build your navigation with text links instead of pictures.

Use a Breadcrumb Trail (Internal Navigation) for every page created

Breadcrumb Trail is a navigation aid that gives users a way to keep track of their location within a website. Using Breadcrumb trails on all pages is a clearcut, standardized way of backtracking from any page, back to the homepage or reversed. You follow the breadcrumb trail back home, so to speak. This is a great way of “explaining” your site structure to Google and other search engines. A breadcrumb Trail helps to keep your website well organized and structured to search engines
Choose a keyword rich domain to use for your website
Choosing a keyword rich domain related to your targeted keywords can be another significant and important tip to achieve better rankings on search engines. Search engines tend to trigger keywords used in your metatags (keywords,description,title) but also in your domain used for your website as well. Go and search for a term or keyword in Google or any other search engine and you will notice that some of your results are triggered exclussively on their domains used rather than their description and titles instead.
Header Tags

Header tags are heading tags in HTML that search engines pay critical attention to them. There are 6 predifined headings, ranging from to which tells a visitor and search engines the topic of the web page. It is best advised that you highlight your main titles and assign a header tag on each giving priority to your main title where H1 and H2 are the strongest and most significant header tags to use in SEO. It is also recommended that you use keywords in your headings for maximum visibility and exposure of your primary targeted keywords.

Avoid Hidden Text

Hidden text is when a text has a similar color to your background color and in result it is invisible to humans to see but visible to search spiders to read. Due to an increase use of hidden text by spammers to increase and boost their keyword triggers on a search, all major engines changed their policy when it comes to hidden text crawls. Consequently, the use of hidden text may result in banning your site from any search engine and should be avoided.