
4. Your website navigation – it helps your web site's usability. 5. Make all of website URLs search engine friendly – Well, all static web pages are search engine friendly but if you are using a dynamic website with .asp or .php, please use server redirection (eg. mod_rewrite, 301 or 302 redirection) to make it into SE friendly URL. Now, we can move on web marketing or SEO facts for the website which you are going to promote in search engines. Let’s start with search engines king Google. Everybody wants their website rankings on the top pages of Google because we all are very well aware about Google search criteria, vast exposure and online marketing. If you can see from Google side, this search engine changes very rapidly in terms of updates. That time is gone when Google made updates every 3-4 months. But now, it is unpredictable.it may not have kept up with the most current trends in the field. You need to know what keywords searchers are using to find whatever your client offers. In the same way, many search engine bots don’t crawl more than a couple directory levels deep. If the meat and potatoes of your site is deep within the site structure, you can count on those pages not being crawled or indexed quickly, if at all. Even if you have a great navigation structure and breadcrumbs in place, it is very hard on a search engine server’s resources to have to crawl deeply into a website’s structure. You can expect to do a certain amount of education as to the nature of SEO and the kinds of results that can be achieved. You may find yourself gritting your teeth if you encounter one of those clients who expect to reach the top of the SERPs tomorrow. Be polite and courteous; you and your client will see a better site emerge from this job if you're working as allies than if you're butting heads. Try to have a clear goal in mind before you start changing the site, whether it's number of visitors, conversions, position in the SERPs, or what have you. With a project like this, you need to have something to work towards, else how will you know when your work is complete? (Granted, the job of an SEO is never really complete, since SERPs are dynamic, but you get my point). Fonts and Headings Font size and color – Using tiny text isn’t easy for web visitors to read, and if they have to struggle to read your content, there is probably a good chance that they won’t even try. Further, many search engines give more weight to text that is bigger than text that is small. It’s also important to a web visitor that they can read the text without having to strain their eyes due to the color of the font or the background. If you're the SEO in charge of redesigning your client's web site, you'll want to ask lots of questions. Your client may not be able to answer them all off the top of his head. Still, if you want to do a good job, it's helpful to know as much about the site and your client's industry as you can. How competitive is the industry? Who are your client's main rivals? When was the site last redesigned, and by whom? What was done? Do you have a history of the site's traffic and conversions for at least the last several months? Think of those questions as just your starting point. It’s difficult also for your web visitor to read flashing, scrolling, or blinking text. Search engines tend to disregard these things as well, so avoiding this type of font behavior is usually best. Don't look upon a site's age as all bad, however. Sure, a site that hasn't been redesigned in a long time looks old, but it has something a newer site doesn't: trust. Google and the other search engines look at a site that's been around for several years in the same way that a bank looks at a customer with a very good credit history built up over time. When you combine that status with a great site redesign, you can achieve excellent results. Headings – The World Wide Web Consortium recommends using heading tags to structure an HTML document. through gives natural stopping and starting points in a web page, but also alerts a visitor to the various sections of the page. Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Website Usability and SEO - Clean Design and Usability Clean Design A clean and uncluttered design is usually a win-win situation for both your visitors and the search engines. The simplest and most cleanly coded websites are usually the ones that are visited and crawled the most, since many people know that they will find what they are looking for and where to find it; they usually are repeat visitors as well. Search engines also like to crawl sites that are not heavy on their resources. Anytime a search engine has to wade through a website in order to find the content, it taxes the search bot’s resources, and may make it spider the site less often. Cleanly coded and compliant HTML makes for easier development for the next web designer to make changes to content. Being able to find your way around someone else’s code is important to new inductees having to look at a page for the first time. Being able to find their way around makes it easier for proofreading, editing, updating content, and fixing site issues that may prevent spidering or ranking well. Your first step should be considering what you already have to work with. Try to go through the site with fresh eyes. If the site was designed a few years ago, it may have been state of the art at the time, but now looks like it's fallen behind the times. In truth, it has; visitors may be looking for something more exciting (or at least more interesting) and Google surely wants to see something other than what it saw five years ago! Extra tags - It’s also my belief that the tag will soon be deprecated, with the popularity and more browsers conforming to CSS standards. Other tags like and and others are already being replaced with other tags, but in a text to code ratio analysis, all those HTML tags will affect these ratios considerably. Keeping them to a minimum is in your best interest. For example, instead of a tag for a table cell looking like this: