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 (). 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 (). 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 (). 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 ( ) 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 () 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 that can be selected:
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 Bearingwala working as Search Engine Optimizer with ConEdify Technologies
http://www.conedify.com
