Tips For Professional & Search Engine Optimized Website by
Zaineb Bearingwala
Online presence has become an integral part of more and more businesses today
in order to either partially or fully sell their products and services. Just
making a presence online is not sufficient, it should be able to catch the eyes
of its prospects and to do so it is crucial that the website should be search
engine and user friendly. It should be properly coded and designed to give the
site an optimized and professional look, so search engines can locate and
categorize it in search engine listings. The following are the steps for
building complete professional & search engine optimized website:
1. Graphic & Layout Designing
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O)
3. Domain Name
4. Website Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines
6. Search Engine Marketing
7. Web site Promotion
A detailed understanding of the above steps can be seen below.
1. Graphic & Layout Designing: First impressions are the best
impressions and hence the first impression of the site can be got from its
graphic and layout designing, further down they are judged by content. The
designing should be simple and lucid. All the pages need to be consistent in
background, color usage, text format and screen layout. Background and Text
Colors-
The color scheme expresses the characters of your website and makes it unique
and attractive. Choose carefully a set of colors for background & text.
While choosing, remember to use dark against light. In other words, use light
text against a dark background or dark text against a light background. Don't
make the mistake of using a background pattern that has both dark and light
colors, it is difficult to choose a text color that is readable against such a
background. Background image or texture chosen should contrast well with the
text color, so that it is easy to read on screen.
Fonts-
One of the most important parts of a web page is text. It can make your page
look very professional or very unprofessional. Always be consistent In other
words, avoid using different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts
used on the Internet are Arial and Verdana as are easiest for computer screen
and for headlines use is Georgia, as it displays slightly in larger fonts.
Formatting Page-
Lay out the page with tables, and set the width in percentage terms (100% to
window size) instead of a fixed number of pixels. That way the content of the
page will be flexible with changes in browser window size, without the need to
scroll horizontally.
Links should be well organized, easy to detect by using appropriate colors.
Underline your links & use a different color for visited links, put a link
to your homepage on all your internal pages. Provide text navigation links at
the bottom of long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.).
Page Contents-
The content of professional website should be in bulleted or numbered list with
direct to the point in short paragraphs, as long blocks of text passages can be
boring for reader. It should give clear intention of the web pages.
Load the top of the individual pages with most important and essential content
with a brief header. Create a simple logo with captivating tag line on the top
of the page as a identity of the website. Use common names for menu options:
Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, and Products. Make a copyright statement at
the bottom of the each web page
File Size-
Web page size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files
(including JavaScript, flash etc.) within the page download from the server.
So, try to keep the size of a web page small by keeping less use of bulky
contents such as video, audio, flash animations etc, which slow down the
display of the page. If the page has too many items to load and slows to
display, break it into smaller pages and link them to a new web page, with link
back from the second page.
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O):
Professional websites can be successful only if they receives most targeted
traffic, the source for traffic are the search engines, hence the websites
should be made search engine friendly or rather say optimized for search
engine. Coding and writing content of the site, as to get sequenced in the list
of search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Below are the basic points for coding for search engines.
Two or three main keywords are to be decided for each page (the words that most
commonly search engine users will type to find the page) These words are to be
repeated often say in the page title, description meta tag, links and page
body.
Title of the Page-
The title of the page is one of the most important elements for site
optimization. It should be included in the HTML tag under head section
(<title></title>). The tag must contain keyword rich phrases, place
name and company name respectively. It should be as a newspaper headline and
unique for individual pages, which reinforce the viewer to go through. The
title should be limited to 62-64 characters. Meta Description Tag-
The Meta description tag usually consists of 160 to 180 characters including
spaces. This too comes under head section of html tag (<meta
name="description" content="">). It should describe what the page is about
in descriptive manner with the main key phrases in it. It has to be written in
an interesting site so as to make it more appealing to the readers there by
catching their interest in the site, as this will appear as a description in
the listing.
Meta Keywords Tag-
The tag should be placed after Title and Meta Description Tag (<meta
name="keyword" content="">). The tag includes the keywords and key phrases
from title, description and some other phrases (believed to be typed by search
engine users in order to track the page) but it should be tried not to exceed
1000 characters. It must contain company and place name. The phrase must not be
repeated thrice. The keywords can be modified in different phrases and placed
in the tag.
Heading Tag-
Each page should have at least one heading tag at the top of the page with
primary keywords/key phrases (<h1> </h1>) and subsections of the
page with h2 tags, and so forth. all the heading tags have to be relevant to
the title and content of the page. The tag should be short and descriptive. Alt
Tag-
The tag is used for images along with img src tag. When the cursor is placed
over an image a text called as alt text (<img src="" alt="">) is
highlighted. The text has be corresponding to the image and must contain key
phrases. The tag should limit to 70 characters.
Content Of Pages-
The content weighs heavily for all major search engines. The content must grab
search engine attention by including all keywords and key phrases in a balanced
ratio (keywords: Total text). Density for keywords should lay under 3% to 5% to
the text of the page, excluding stop words (words which search engine
automatically ignores).
The main keyword should be placed in the first 25 words of the visible content
because they're given more importance than other areas. The last few lines also
hold considerable weight, though it's less than the former.
Navigation-
Proper navigation carries lot of importance for optimizing search engine. The
navigation tab must contain Keyword rich anchor text on the top of the page. It
should have descriptive title indicating summary of the page. HTML hyperlinks
that lead to major pages inside the website are to be added to the home page.
A successful navigation design should include a sitemap for Search engines, so
that they can scrawl all the links and this "Site Map" is to be placed on the
home page of the site.
3. Domain Name:
Short Domain name having keywords and phrases of the website along with the
company name should be chosen as, search engines do give importance to key word
rich domain names. Though it can go to 67 characters max. Hyphenated domain
names are easy for search engine as can be distinguished for keywords occurring
in domain name. Consider domains starting with A, B or C as some directories do
alphabetical placement of websites. Avoid promotion digits like "1" or 1st,
since the Open Directory considers only the meaningful part of a domain. Common
TLDs (A top-level domain) the last part of an Internet domain name; the final
dot of any domain name available are ".org",".net",".com" else country specific
use.".org" are use for non-profit organizations. Country specific TLD should be
use by websites which carter product or service limited to particular country.
It is advisable to use ". com", though one can consider registering a ".net"
domain, but since most people are familiar with ".com", it is always better to
stick to convention.
4. Website Hosting:
Web Hosting empowers sharing information, selling products and services, and
interacting with people through a web site, so, a reliable Web Hosting Service
that gives fast loading, 24/7 tech support, client owned domain name, minimum
20MB - 50MB server space, back-up system, Unlimited free access via FTP/Telnet,
email accounts, Easy access to log files should be chosen.
Web hosting platform should be selected according to required operating system
(unix or windows) depending on the website functionality. Unix/Linux based
hosts provide PHP, Perl/CGI, FrontPage, and very limited ASP functionality. If
running an Application that requires ASP, .NET, MS SQL, SBS or Access, the need
will be for a Windows based web host; usually a little more expensive.
Types of web hosting server you would like to select -
1. Shared Web Hosting
2. Dedicated Web Hosting
3. Managed Hosting
4. The Virtual Private Server (VPS)
5. Co-located Hosting
6. Reseller Hosting
7. Free Web Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines:
The next step is to submit website to directories. Directories are search
engines powered by human beings. Human editors compile the list of website in
respective categories. Select the required category for the website and submit
it to "add site" page with the required data information.
Getting listed with the important directories is very important, because many
people see their listings. In addition, if you are listed with them, then
crawler-based search engines are more likely to find your site and add it to
their listings for free. Similar to directories search engine are also
collection of website, but they are powered by ROBOTS. These Robots crawl
automatically web pages to compile their listings. You have to fill out the
form to submit the website by giving the url of the site. Submit only home
page, as search engine will follow the links from the index page.
Submit website to major search engine manually, don't rely on software; it may
result in over submission. Actually, handful of major search engine and
directories distributes their results or indexes to many huge portals and
search engines, in other words there are many affiliated search engines. Thus,
before submitting you should be aware of which search engine is powered by
whom. If you submit to every front-end search engine then you will be
submitting the WebPages to same search engine, which can result you in penalty
by removing from index or de-ranking the site
6. Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M) :
Search Engine Marketing involves marketing of your Website through Goggle ad
words, MSN Ad Center, banner ads and other keyword purchasing programs as well
as purchasing links, ads, and sponsored listings.
Goggle ad words, msn Ad Center refer to Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC advertisements
are usually text written ads placed near search results or indexes. When a user
clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged with an amount. The
Advertiser also has to pay for the placement
7. Web site Promotion:
This category includes article Marketing, Press Releases, link Popularity,
buying traffic, blogging, forum Posting and more.
If you want to be one big step ahead of your competition you have to build as
many one-way links as you can. The best and easy way to do this is writing and
submitting optimized topical articles to articles banks over the Internet.
Along with your article, you will include a short bio about yourself where you
can place your website URL. This will also generate traffic to your site.
Posting comments related to your topic, involved in the conversations, be
helpful by giving quality solution, that means joining the forums or blogs
The forums are a place where people give quality comments and do post questions
for their queries.
Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food,
politics, or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to
other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.
Above steps ensure a search engine optimized and professional website, which can
probably gain good traffic and good page rank with top position in result
pages.
About the Author
The article is written by Zaineb Bearingwwala working as Search Engine Optimizer
with ConEdify Technologies
http://www.conedify.com
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