Web Design Approaches

Search engines rank keywords found near the top of a document higher than those farther in. They rank words that appear more frequently higher except that if they are too frequent then you can get dinged for search engine spamming and they may greatly reduce your ranking or de-list your site altogether.

I am not a big fan of style sheets but there are some major benefits when it comes to search engines. By putting the formatting data in a separate file, it concentrates the content of the document on the document page and by extension keyword density, resulting in higher rankings.

If you have JavaScript functions in your page, place them at the end of the page rather than at the top. This way they will not dilute the ranking of text.

I strongly recommend avoiding flash intros. Most search engines can not index flash content and it may prevent them from getting deeper in the page where text content is found. If there is a compelling reason to have a flash presentation then it is best to place it on a separate page with a link on the main page that people can select if they want to watch it.

Write for a human audience. Search engines are trying to find the best content for human audiences. If you write to human audiences you will be writing exactly the type of document that search engines want to provide to their clients.

Use complete sentences and paragraph structures. Use proper spelling and grammar. Many modern search engines check these things so that they can provide their customers with the highest quality documents possible.

Titles are important. Your website title should accurately reflect the content of the page. Consider what the customer is going to search for. Most likely they will not be searching for your company name unless they are an existing customer. They will be searching for a good or service or for specific information. Your title should describe the information that will be found on the web page.

I've seen sites that will add a lot of keywords into a document that has absolutely nothing to do with the site content. Most often these seem to be porn sites but I've also seen it done with drug sites and penis enhancement pill sites and internet gambling sites. While doing this may draw traffic to your page, to what ends? What would you do if you got that result in a search? I immediately hit the back key and go on to the next prospective link on the search results page. All that has been accomplished is that they wasted a bit of my time and their bandwidth. Search engines are getting smarter at weeding these out fortunately.

The bottom line is write for your audience but avoid things that specifically make a document unfriendly to search engines, such as flash, frames, excessive HTML keywords, don't spam keywords, make your title and meta tags match your content, and use proper grammar and spelling. By making your document the kind of document people will actually want to read you maximize the chances that a search engine will rank it highly.

Consistency

Search engine optimization, optimizing your web site so that it comes up near the top of the listings in major search engines, is both an art and a science.

The art aspect is mostly trying to guess on aspects of human psychology. You need to guess what the human will type into the search box when looking for whatever it is your web site deals with.

Search engines are keyword driven. They are going to look through your document, find keywords, and index them. Ranking in most search engines is determined by the number of relevant links from elsewhere on the Internet to your site.

More relevant links from other sites to your site results in a higher ranking. Relevant links from other sites are considered votes for the importance of your site.

Google was the first to adopt this algorithm but it has become widely adopted by other search engines now. Sites sprung up which registered thousands of domains, each of them containing nothing more than links to other websites, so that you could, for a fee, instantly have one thousand (or more) links to your site and a high ranking.

Link farms ruined the value of the Google factor for determining the worthiness of content, but search engines responded by checking the relevancy of those links.

To be considered relevant the anchor text of the site with the link to yours must contain text that matches the content of your site. That sites page should have text that matches that anchor text. Your sites title, text, and meta tags should match. When all of these things are true, then that link is considered relevant.

Too many irrelevant links to your site can result in your sites ranking being penalized for "spamming", or de-listed altogether. You should never submit your site to link farms.

Be wary of offers to submit your site to a huge number of search engines. Usually most of those will be link farms. Either hand submit your site to the top search engines or use a submission tool that only submits to top search engines such as Scrub The Web.