Search Engine Promotion (SEP) Advice for Web Site Designers

Search engine promotion has been a hot topic for a while. Many owners understand that without professional SEO service their investments in websites are likely to fail. It is typical though to see a professionally designed pages that miss or ignore the SEP component.

Web designers have plenty of things to take care of or worry about: Static or dynamic, ASP or PHP, HTML or XHTML, browser compatibility - this is just a very short list of problems they face. Being busy with their primary tasks web designers often miss search engine issues. That can be a primary reason for many websites and web pages not to appear in search results at all.

Although SEO should be performed by specialists, some initial efforts can be applied during the web design stage.

10 Tips for Web Designers

1.Do not miss the Title tag. Although it is optional, it has a maximum weight for search engines. SEO specialists spend hours researching and creating good titles. Do your client a favor - if SEO is not budgeted for make sure that every page you work on has a meaningful title. 2.Do not miss DESCRIPTION meta tag. All meta tags are optional. Be aware that description is second important SEO issue. Try to match it to title.

3.Make sure that title and description are located within HEAD.

4.Do not use dynamic pages if you can. The project architecture may dictate usage of PHP, ASP etc. However search engines are reluctant to index them.

5.JScript is fun to use but it makes it harder for search engines to understand the content of the page. If you need just a menu highlight try to use style instead of script.

6.Pages with Flash are difficult to optimise for search engines. How about web sites that are built on Flash? They impress visitors. However how do visitors find such websites?

7.Utilize style sheets. Most of modern pages use style sheets. Very few utilise them effectively. That is why web pages are overloaded with HTML attributes. That makes them heavier and slower in load.

8.Search engine look for text - not images. If possible use text rather than image.

9.Text of the page should be at least 250 words. Search engines do not score pages with just a few sentences.

10.Text of the page shouldn't be very lengthy. To make search engines happy stick with the page size of 15KB - including images.