Hosting a Search Engine Friendly Site - How to design a search engine friendly website
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Many website designers don't design their sites for the search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifully designed website may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.
Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly website:
1. Research highly targeted keywords - do this even before you begin designing otherwise you may have to go back and clean up some of your website design. Use the keyword research tool, Wordtracker to research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your website. Wordtracker will show how many people have searched for that particular keyword over several search engines within the last 60 days.
2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your Web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small number of competing websites.
3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top of each Web page. Weave your keywords within this text being careful not have them so close together that your copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines as well as your website visitors.
4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your Web page.
5. Include Header Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.
6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has 2 purposes:
a) visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this
could help your site's rankings.
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