Learn SEO – Design & Structure

Now that we have introduced you to search engine optimization let’s move on. Design and structure play a crucial role in developing your website. You want to make it appealing but then again crawlable by search engine spiders.

Navigation

As I have explained previously, with navigation you don’t want to use images or flash in place of your text for categories. Using images behind it with text layered over it or css menu’s works fine. The reason being is search engine spiders cannot read the text for your categories when they are an image or flash object. They read text.

Now with your categories you don’t want to use titles for example if you have an seo site:

tips , tricks , tutorials and etc..

Try to use some of your targeted keywords in it that define your websites categories like:

SEO Tips , SEO Tutorials, etc..

Meta Tags:

Optimizing your tags may be tricky for some, let’s discuss meta keywords first. These will not help your page ranking anymore because of the abuse in the past but it is still good through put a few of your targeted keywords in there. If I remember the limit is 600 chars in the tag. I would only use 25 or less words to really describe my site / page.

Using a meta description for each page describes what it is about in the search engine listings. Try to make it stick out from the other sites. Now for meta title and pages titles you want to base it off of your pages topic with one or 2 keywords in it. This will help your ranking and is appealing to the user searching for selected content.

Layout

Designing a nice layout is always hard. As explained in the intro, you always want to draw out a rough draft on paper before you begin to put it to action. Don’t make your layout too overwhelming with links,text,images crammed all over. I usually stick with a nice simple structure with a few decent images and what not. It all depends on what kind of site you are running. With gaming websites you can get away with all of the cool images everywhere and what not. Remember, css does wonders.

Sitemap

Having a site map let’s spiders know all of your pages updates and what pages you have. Anytime you add new content or update a page you want to make an update your you site map. You can find free sitemap websites all over the net that make it simple to create one. You want to submit it to Google when you are done. I will just discuss the robots.txt file here. With this file it will tell search engine spiders which directories that you want crawled and which ones you do not. This helps if you have private things or just stuff you don’t want listed in search engines.

The next addition to this tutorial will be on Content. Stay tuned!

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