web design

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13 Crucial SEO Checklist for Web Designing

Before making a website live, there are certain SEO points that need to be taken care of otherwise visibility of the website in the SERP [Search Engine Result Page] can take a serious beating. Check out the following 13 SEO points that you need to take a second look at before making your website live -

Fix Canonical Issue

A website can be accessed via two different URLs – one with WWW version [eg -http://www.example.com] and another Without WWW version [eg -http://example.com]. This is also known as canonical issue. To fix this, you need to make a choice between them and stick to that specific version and redirect the other version to the selected version.

Don’t Complicate the Structure

Designing is not rocket science but the problem is that some people tend to believe it to be. They tend to use complex imageries, technical jargons and other complicated things that eventually ruin the interface of the website and make it look like a riddle to the targeted audience.

Domain Name

After the Google’s EDM [exact match domain update], it does not make any sense, if you choose a keywords rich domain name. So, choose a domain name that is easy to remember and has some brand value associated with

Use Keywords in File/ Directory Name

The directory, sub-directory or file names of the website should be meaningful. Use of random words or phrases is strongly discouraged. It would be great if you can use keywords in the file or directory names.

Use Hyphens

To separate words in a directory, you need to use Hyphen. Search Engines treat – ‘Hyphen’ as separator or space. For example, the following file name – ‘best-SEO-tricks-2014’ will be parsed by search engines as – ‘Best SEO Tricks 2014’. But the same is not true with ‘underscore’. The following file name – ‘Best_Web_Design_Practices’ will be parsed by search engines as – ‘BestWebDesignPractices’.

Make The Web Page Load Faster

If your webpage takes more than 5 seconds to load, 95% of your targeted visitors will bounce back. The ideal page should not be more than 15K. Remember not everybody around has high speed internet connection and therefore, you need to make the pages as lightweight as possible.

Simple Navigation

A consistent and simple navigation make it easier for visitors to browse the website without facing any hassle. Make the top navigation clearly visible so that people can navigate from one page to other without much fuss.

Meta Tags

This is probably the worst mistake that you can make. Title and Meta Description are two most important Meta tags that are widely used by search engines to populate their search result page. But there are some rules of thumb that need to be followed properly. For say, you need to do a keywords research properly and then incorporate those keywords in the Title and Meta Description naturally.

Say no To Frames

Never ever use Frame while developing a web page because Frames make your website largely invisible to search engines.

Use Texts Rather Than Images

Texts in the images cannot be parsed by search engines and therefore, you need to make sure that you are using texts while internal linking. This is a common practice and therefore, you should be maintaining this practice throughout the website.

Validation

All the pages of your website should adhere to W3C standards as strictly as possible. Though there is no direct relation between ranking and W3C Validation, a website with loads of validation errors does not evoke positive response.

Robots.txt File

Robots.txt file help you get complete control over which pages of your website will appear on the Search Engine Result Pages and which will not. Since the directives of Robots.txt are honored by most search engines, you will be able to have complete control over the visibility of the website on the SERP.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are another prominent on page element that should be used whenever possible. A page should start with H1 tag and other Heading tags should be used subsequently.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Michael Evans .

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