SEO - Design & Layout

Determining Design and Layout

Design and Layout is the first thing a user notices when visiting a site, take proper care to give a good first impression, maintaining a middle ground is the goal here - not too fancy and not too rigid. The aim is to get net surfers to stay longer and make some click-throughs.

Search engines though smart are just software and not humans, who can read the content of their interest. Too much complication from a website makes for the inability to properly parse content by search engines, making indexing inefficient, which results in a low ranking.

Actual page content should have a 10% keyword density and weigh in at about 200 words, many opinions about this exist as there are SEO experts, a faction supports a keyword density of 5% and another 20%. 10% density can is good enough.

Guidelines To Follow In Web Page Design

1. Go for more text content than HTML elements. 

2. Do not use frames. Frames are the enemies of search engines, and vice versa. 

3. Do not use ads if possible, since most of the ads use Java-Script which is not advised. 

4. Call your JavaScript code from an external file and try not to dump everything in an HTML file. Include text links at the bottom of the page if using JavaScript drop-down menus, because these menus prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. 

5. Use proper fitting words on the page topic, avoid putting anything that doesn’t fit perfectly in the page topic. 

6. Keep files as close to the root as possible, avoid unnecessary directories.

7. Avoid using anything fancy such as Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers, etc., unless required.