Design Your Web Pages for Search Engines

When you design your pages for better search engine ranking, you have to think like the search engine algorithm does. The essential process is pretty straightforward. Gobble up the entire contents of the page. Give extra ranking weight to the most important parts of the page, and let the less important parts have less influence. It sounds simple and it can be if you help them. The trick is balancing your design requirements with the search engine ranking methods.

I've discussed how Google and the other search engines pay extra attention to things like the contents of the <title> tag in my other SEO Tips pages. But what I haven't discussed is the importance of the structure of your webpages.

If you've read the previous articles on this website, you should start to see a pattern emerge: Search Engines Don't Think. That is, they cannot and do not try to intuit the relative value of every word on your webpages. At their foundation, they rely on some pretty simple, straightforward methods that involve emphasis, relative position, and to a lesser extent, repetition. Yes, they now have much more sophisticated analysis methods available to them than ever before. But before you start to worry about those too much, you should start at the ground floor.

When a search engine starts to analyze a page for ranking it for a given search term, they start with the obvious - the HTML tags which present a structure to the page's content and its focus. So, the content of the page's <title> tag and the <h1> and <h2> tags are designed to denote emphasis and are given extra weight. Similarly, words and phrases that are enclosed in <b>old are also weighted above plain text.

The legacy of the Myth of the <META> tag still haunts many web designers. You'll often see a Keywords <META> tag stuffed with dozens of keywords, including past tense, future tense, past tense possessive, plurals, and singular variations on the site's keywords. Don't make yourself crazy here. First of all, only Yahoo! pays any attention to the Keywords <META> tag for ranking. For your main page, eight or ten broad-term keywords in this tag are plenty. Let the interior pages bear the burder of more specific keywords and phrases. The only <META> tags your webpages need are (1) Description, (2) Keyword, (3) Content-type, and (optionally) (4) Robots. All of the rest are superfluous as far as search engines are concerned and only serve to obsure the content of your webpage. While Google does not use the content of the Description <META> tag for keyword ranking, there is good reason to believe that having unique, relevant, and useful content in this tag is an important signal of quality for that page, and for your site as a whole. Further, since Google will often use the content of the Description <META> tag for the snippet it displays in the search results, it's just common sense to include a description that will entice users to click on the link in the search results.

Don't try to make your main page bear the burden of snaring traffic for all of your website's keywords. The main page should hit the primary broad-theme keywords and the internal pages should focus on the more specific topics. Too many sites try to cover every topic on their main page. The more focus your main page puts on your primary topics, the better off you'll be in the long run.

So the theme here is, to borrow a phrase, "Don't Bury The Lead." That means removing unnecessary clutter from the <head> section, putting your most important information in the first paragraph or two of your document's main content, which should absolutely include an <h1> tag to emphasize the primary topic of the page as well as the location of the main content.

Designing Your Website for Search Engines

Search Engine Friendly Website Design