Site Design

A website is a collection of web pages and although Google ranks individual pages rather than entire sites, how these pages are interconnected and managed has an impact on SEO. Many of the tips are common sense from the perspective of making the visitor experience as good as possible, but the vast majority are not implemented by a surprising number of sites.

Checking the load time of your site

The basic problem is that slow sites drive visitors away, and since there’s no guarantee how fast a visitor’s connection will be, it pays to optimize your web pages to make them as small as possible. There are range of tools that can help you do this.

Validating your web pages

Browsers work on standards-based languages, so you should validate your web pages to ensure compatibility across the broadest range of browsers.

Avoid Flash, frames – and Ajax

100% Flash sites are inherently bad for on-page SEO. Frames-based sites are also not search-engine friendly, but thankfully seem to be going out of fashion. Learn why Flash, frames and even Ajax are problematic for search engine spiders.

Use a CMS and add a blog

Content management systems take the heavy-lifting out of website design and content management, but also can be good for search engine optimization. WordPress can be used to add a blog to your site – find out why blogs can have a transformative effect on your search engine rankings.

Navigation and sitemap

Visitors are turned off by poor navigation, but search engine spiders often can’t find (and therefore index) orphaned pages. Learn the tips to ensure  your site’s navigation is logical to visitors and search engine-friendly.

Good site design starts with the end user in mind and a good user experience directly translates to a good reputation in search engines.