Online marketers understand the importance of getting top search engine rankings in major search engines. Therefore, they spend many time in optimizing website content. However, many of them ignore the fact that web design structure has a role in search engine optimization (SEO). To acquire high ranking, you cannot just rely on web designers because they could be good at web design but not good at SEO.

This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process.

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is good to use CSS stylesheet to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS. It is no good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes consise, and mainly compose of your website content.  It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management Software (CMS)

If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

a. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content.

b. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.

c. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine ranking.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript.  However, the coding usually leaves in the HTML body. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file. 

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

7. Flash

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website.  However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website.  In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.


Conclusion:

For small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot give you any business as no one can find your website from search engines and if it annoys your visitors.

Once you have a product and a merchant account, you need some way to let your visitors visit your store, select products, add them to a cart and check out easily through a secure payment gateway. Typically, this is what a good ecommerce shopping cart interface does. The more intuitive your shopping cart software, the easier it is for customers to shop.

So, a shopping cart is nothing but an ecommerce solution that makes it easy for customers to shop with you. Right? Yes … and no.

Today, shopping cart solutions have grown much beyond their original scope. Time was when shopping carts only controlled inventory, accepted orders and processed payments. Today, all that is history. In order to combine a variety of useful features into one shopping cart solution, companies have been bundling quite a number of useful ‘extras’ to the original shopping cart. Ready to go front end designs, great administrative features, advanced security and supported payment gateways are some of these. With the help of these, it is possible for owners to get their internet store up and running within a few short minutes.

But, the question still remains – how do you bring customers to your store?

Search engines are the back bone of a web business. As business owners may be aware, the main job of a website is to woo search engine rankings. Search engines are very powerful; however, taming them is rather simple. A number of minute steps taken at the right time is all it takes to top the rankings at Google and Yahoo search engines.

Many companies are now offering what is called the SEO friendly shopping cart. In an effort to enhance marketing, SEO friendly shopping carts offer a number of neat features that make these shopping carts very valuable to an online trader. SEO friendly shopping carts take care of search engine optimization, so all you have to do is plug in the shopping cart solution and get ready to sell.

SEO friendly shopping carts have very powerful in-built SEO features that make it easy for you to optimize your website for search engines. They help you promote your website by generating search engine friendly web pages. Well-designed front ends make it easy for crawlers to pick up key words. Aptly titled pages are a favorite with search engines and SEO friendly shopping carts title each of your pages appropriately so they show up when customers search for your products. SEO friendly shopping carts also generate sufficient keyword density to help your pages rank high in internet searches. Search engine friendly product catalog, automatic generation of a well defined sitemap and search engine friendly URLs are other useful features. Of course, SEO friendly shopping carts also add the necessary meta, title and description tags to your web pages.

SEO friendly shopping carts take much of the hard work out of online marketing. With a robust solution, business owners have to do little more than stocking up on their inventory and getting ready for sales.

The level of success of a website on the internet is directly dependent upon the SEO friendliness of the content it contains. SEO friendly website design calls for sufficient planning and expertise. A comprehensive understanding of the search engine optimization method is a must and the points which make a difference have to be implemented strategically. It is a mixed procedure of guidelines and first hand ideas. This evolving field is regularly enriched with new tools and techniques.

The most important part of the process is keyword research. The more a professional will focus on this the better results will come forward. Keyword research can be done with proven tools such as Word tracker. The keywords need to be placed strategically in URLs, titles, files and folder names and in the body of the text with a preferable density of 3% to 7%. Some search engines can penalize contents due to indiscriminate use of keywords in them. Keywords should also be put in the anchored text containing hyperlinks.

There are some aspects regarding the use of Flash, Frames etc. which need proper discussion. Both of these should largely be avoided other than special cases. The problem with Flash is that when Search Engine Spiders crawl the website the flash files are overlooked causing subsequent loss of content. Where Flash cannot be dispensed with, a link should be provided to view the content in flash. But the link should not be put in the index page of the website.

Same caution should be followed regarding Frames. The crawling of Search Engine Spiders becomes difficult where Frames have been used. Sometimes a frame browser is separately needed. Where it has to be used it should be accompanied by a proper tag so that at least some portion of the content can be taken by the search engine. Search Engine friendliness makes all the difference for the success of a website.

CSS Style sheets are useful tools in web design. It is a complementary but not necessary element. It simplifies the making of layout and the control of styles and placements on the website. It is especially useful for web pages with tables. With CSS Stylesheet professionals can make websites quicker for loading and easier for Search Engines to access.

SEO Web design is a specialized area where proper methodology and technical know-how can only ensure satisfactory result. Professionals should keep in mind that in the vast and growing SEO base a solution should be comprehensive enough to have a distinction of its own.

A web site’s foremost objective is to attract visitors. Major portion of this traffic comes from the search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search engines. If the site is search-engine-friendly, then it can rate very high in search engines and can attract this quality traffic with ease.

A search engine uses “robots” or “crawlers” to index the web pages. These crawlers visit the web pages through either links on other indexed pages or through the website submission to the search engines. After getting indexed, the search engines rank the pages using various algorithms to rank and records them in their database. These records then are displayed the search engine’s result pages according to the keywords typed by the readers.

To rank better in the search engines, i.e., to create search engine friendly pages, it is prudent to avoid using frames on the web page. These frames are complicated in nature, and majority of search engines simply avoid the pages that has frames on it. As the search engine crawlers can only read text, the images and flash movies have no importance in SEO techniques. Use HTML to code your web pages, because the search engines can read it and, thus, can benefit your web pages.

To make the job of the search engine crawlers easier, use meta tag properly on every web page. The meta tags help the search engines to understand the web page and its theme. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), because CSS is extremely efficient and can make the designing of the website easier. Majority of web design firms prefers to use the cascading style sheets, because the CSS allow them to separate the layout from the content. This creates a layout and design uniformity across the pages, making it easier to concentrate on production of just the content.

Optimum usage of good keywords that portray the theme of your website results in the web page’s popularity. Selection of good keywords and key phrases needs careful planning. The selected winning keywords and key phrases can create instant success with the search engines, the traffic that is generated, and can immensely boost the site’s popularity. You can find plenty of good keyword research tools on the internet.

The heart and soul of any search engine optimization campaign is to target key phrases that has the potential to create great demand but have little competition at present. Then there are major concerns regarding on-page and off-page optimization, and your web pages needs to address these too. All these are parts of the overall SEO strategy that also covers all aspects of your target market, and Kansas City Web Site Design and Development firm has the best solutions to these.

As you can see, creating search engine friendly pages needs careful planning, designing, and implementation. Only then it will lead to a successful SEO campaign. A professional and experienced team of SEO experts can manage all these needs and can create traffic to your website through well planned SEO campaign.

A good web site design and development firm can apply a professional approach to designing search engine friendly pages that will bring in visitors to the website, keep them on your site for longer, and will bring them back again!

Website is a handy and trendy marketing tool for business. For a good website, the visual web design must be attractive and must be able to grab the attention of more number of visitors. Web designing is an art and has to be done with interest and involvement. When done with involvement, the user-friendly feature will automatically get incorporated in the design. Stunning web design with good programming and marketing strategies will greatly increase the visibility of the website to the Internet browsers. From this introduction it can be understood easily that web design is the key aspect of a website. For designing a user-friendly website here are a few tips which I gained through my experience in web designing. These useful tips, when implemented, will yield good user-friendly web designs. Here we go.

1). What does the website convey? – Your answer to the question will lead you all the way to a good and meaningful web design. For designing a website, one should have a theme. On getting to know more of what the website is about, as a designer or as a Webmaster, it will be easy for you to design accordingly.

2). Planning for the web design – Planning makes work proceed smoothly. The first step in planning is research. Surf through the web to find sites similar to yours. Do a simple yet meaningful research to understand the pulse of the visitors. On doing so, your first impression of the website through your web design will always be the best impression.

3). Setting theme and layout – After your research and planning, the vital part of your web design is the collection of assets. The first step will be theme selection and webpage layout. There may be personal websites, informational websites, ecommerce websites and service providing websites. It is all in the hands of a designer to select a matching theme to satisfy the need and implement it attractively.

4). Web Page Design – Neat and informative web pages will be the most visited pages in the net. To design such a web page, the important elements to be taken note of are the header, footer, text area and the navigational area. Avoid using animated/flashy headers and navigational icons. Use uniform header and footer to give a professional look to the website. These, when designed with care and when followed, will result in good web design.

5). Site Map and Navigation – In web designing, the term navigation is very much apropos with user-friendly. Navigation within the website should very clear and easy. Always try to implement normal links to move around and avoid animated buttons. The column to the right of the webpage should have good navigational links. The site map is another important and easy way for finding web pages in the website. So, never forget these as these are the principal tips to be remembered while designing.

6). Usage of images and text – Web designing is all about expressing the ideas of the business to people. For it to be a success, use of correct images for communicating the content of the website to the visitors is a must. The text in the webpage must be search engine optimized and must convey the message clearly.

7). Page Size and Download Time – After placing the images, links and the text, the complete page should not exceed 30 KB. This size will ensure that the page is downloaded quickly within 5 to 6 seconds. This time is crucial time because either it may bring visitors or divert them to another website of the same type.

The above are a few important tips to be considered while designing a website. You can follow them or modify them to suit your need. But the fact is that designing is about presenting the information in an elegant, decorative and user-friendly way.