SEO Website Design - Getting it Right the First Time

When Website design first started no real attention was paid to search engine optimization. Website designers knew html or an html design program such as Front Page or Dreamweaver. A good designer also had an eye for layout, colors, etc. Search Engine Optimization was little known and less understood. Since far fewer websites had been designed and put on the Internet you still had a chance to be found even if you paid little heed to search engine marketing.

This is no longer true. The number of websites available on the web and the amount of competition they provide is mind boggling. This is true for most subjects and areas of business.

For instance just for fun last night I typed into MSN's BING, Google and Yahoo the name of my old boarding school, Institut Auf Dem Rosenberg. Even though the name is in German and I typed it into English language version of these three search engines my search pulled up 99,700 results in MSN, 35,500 results in Google and 276,000 results in Yahoo. Strange, but true. You can imagine how many results show up if you type in something like paving stones, get a new mortgage, or diet secrets. In case you're curious about it paving stones calls up 665,000 in Google. Get a new mortgage produces 477,000,000 results in Yahoo and type diet secrets into Bing.com and you will get 13,600,000 results. Now that's competition!

If you're providing a service or product in a smaller geographic area your chances of being found in a users search increase remarkably. Not only is the competition naturally less but the chances are good that other businesses or professional services such as yours have not yet realized the incredible power of Internet advertising.

Succeeding with search engine optimization and getting high rankings in the natural listings for your local business is not difficult. The on-site optimization just needs to be an out-growth of natural design. This is easiest to do if it's incorporated into the structure and content of the site from its inception. This is SEO Website Design.

Here are some things to consider for ensuring your site is search engine friendly from the very beginning:

Make sure every page of your site has the proper meta tags.

All internal links must be somewhere on the first page in regular html. It's fine if you want to create some very cool buttons for your site in Flash or JavaScript. But the search engines all have difficulty reading and following those links. The easiest solution to this is to repeat the links in at the bottom of each page. You can do this in a way that will not detract from your design yet will give the search engines a way to follow your links to the other pages of your site.

Make your design clear to visitors. Lead each person browsing your site where you want them to go. If you want them to see all the services you have to offer make that the focus of your home page. If you want your visitor to go to a product page and buy something make the link to that page your focus.

Keep you site, new, interesting and fresh. You want people (and search engine spiders) to return to your site over and over again. Give them a reason to do so. A website should never be left to stagnate.

Create two site maps. One is a list of all the pages of your site much like a table of contents in a book. The other is a sitemap done in a special format that can be read by the search engines. This sitemap will increase the chances that each page of your site is indexed and ranked.

Once your site is published with correct meta tags and lots of content start looking for external links. Get other websites to link to yours. The more quality links the better.

Repeat. Keep going over your site, adding content, checking links, adding to your site maps and looking for external links. Over time your site will rise in the ranks and customers and clients will be finding you in the natural listings.

If you already have a website you can still use the above steps as a guide to making your website search engine friendly and getting listed in the natural search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing.