What do we need to make our site SEO compatible? What do I take care while designing a new site, if I am going for search engine optimization?

These and many such questions will hinder while preparing or optimizing a site.

Well the foundation of search engine optimization starts from the website design itself. It is the first step towards your web promotion. The below are the key elements for an SEO-compliant website design:

1. Text is the key

The crawler coming to the site will only read the HTML part of the page. It is not intelligent enough to read the text contained in the image or a flash. So better keep your page content as much possible in text.

Most important is to keep the text relevant. Text without any relevance to the subject will kill the users’ interest in the site. What’s the use of a site that ranks well but is struggling to maintain the visitors’ interest in the site? Ultimately the main reason behind SEO is a good conversion ratio.

1. Image links – Not a fair priced deal

Text links are read by the search engine crawlers and render the same irrespective of the browsers being used.

Though image links are followed and counted as well and the text in the ‘alt’ attributes will serve the purpose of a text link (aka; anchor text). But it is equally important to note, that the ‘alt’ attributes do not hold the same value as the anchor text.

1. Say NO to Flash and Splash

Flash has made a major impact into website designing ever since its inception. Flash animation is a great way to present complex content because it allows the designer to put more content in a finite space, without wrecking page design. But unfortunately Search engine crawlers do not read flash. Recently, many experts have been working on optimizing a flash and have been successful to an extent but there are no fool-proof methods to optimize the flash.

A site built with major portion in flash suffers a great disadvantage because even with the most organized page structure and content the site may not perform well.

Few sites often use splash page to convey a clear message to the visitors of what the site is all about. In order to create a lasting impression they use flash or nice big graphic. But unfortunately a splash page will damage search engine rankings on the contrary they sometimes annoy the visitors.

1. Avoid using frames

There are several reasons for not avoiding frames, like –

1. Frames do not let the visitors bookmark the page.
2. The search engines can’t crawl a page that has frames
3. Using frames is not a user-friendly solution.
4. One trickier problem is accessibility. Not all user agents can render frames.
5. There are newer alternatives that can give us more flexibility than using frames.

1. Relevant Image names

Give relevant image names. Image names must be good and descriptive. The image should be between relevant text. The search engine crawlers cannot read the image but they can definitely read the image file names and the text surrounding the image. This will help in optimizing the images on the site for image search in search engines.

1. Code – Keep it clean

Avoid nested table tags. Put JavaScript functions into external files. Remove unnecessary tags to avoid clogging and confusion in the code. Avoid JavaScript redirects.

The above are the elementary things to be taken care of while designing a site. Quick start your SEO along with the new website and gear up for its promotion once the site is ready.

Cheers! J