While the content of the website itself is of utmost importance when optimizing your site for search engine rankings, you should not forget that the website design itself plays a vital role in search engine optimization, making it important outside of the concerns of usability. Search engines also take into account the layout, as well as the underlying code when it comes to ranking a website. Here are some of the things you need to consider:
1. Even though correct semantic markup and compliance with W3C code standards can be disregarded if you just want a high ranking page in search engines, you need to make sure that you eliminate as many errors as possible in the code, since it may trip up a search engine spider and prevent your site from being indexed properly.
2. If you employ cascading style sheets (which you should, in this day and age), you have control over which part of the body will appear first. Without css, the top banner and side navigation appears first but CSS allows you to put the most important part of your site first – the main body and its contents.
3. Use a Content Management System for your site’s text content, as it allows you to focus on what the text contains while at the same time, maintaining a cleaner and more optimized backend code. CMS also makes it easier to manage your website even as it grows larger (whereas manually updating a website becomes more difficult the larger it becomes)
4. Put a lot of effort into optimizing the part of your website that attracts the most clicks from users. You can find out which part of your site this is by using a website heat map such as Click Density or the more popular Crazy Egg. A lot of these heat map generators analyze the layout and content of the site, but one of the more things it also analyzes (which you can do yourself) is estimate the field of vision of a visitor and map the path his eyes take in between elements of a page.
5. Content is one of the more powerful parts of the site you can use for SEO, and as such, you must ensure that the density of content in your site is up to par. Do take note that quantity does not necessarily equate to quality. Make sure the text content of your site is unique (do not copy, as that could result in your site being marked as spam by search engines), and that it is properly optimized for the topics of keywords that you want to corner.
6. If you plan on making a large website, the most important thing you have to consider is usability and manageability. No matter how large a site is, it should be easy to navigate for the users, and let you update sections and content without requiring a huge time investment. CMS systems can be used for the latter, and the former can be addressed through careful planning and organization of navigation links.
7. Last but not the least – embrace the fact that a lot of users nowadays use mobile devices for surfing, and as such, your site must be perfectly usable even on the limited screen real estate provided by mobile devices. Of course, it is impossible to optimize your layout for both large screens and mobile devices, so keep a separate mobile-optimized version of your site, and make it accessible from every single page of your main layout, so that users can shift anytime.
If you want to target mobile device using surfers, you also need to remember that data transfer is limited by bandwidth caps as well as the overall speed of their connections, so make sure that your site looks good without bloating the code.
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Sincerely,
Steven Yap
Internet Marketing Specialist
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