As promised yesterday,  here are a few more SEO tips for designers.

Provide A Link To Your Home Page: Of course, we all know we should do this but you might have not thought over the right way to do it from SEO point of view.

Find problem with these two structures:

<a href=”index.html”>home</a>

<a href=”http://www.example.com/index.html”>home</a>

Can you find out the problem? The problem is linking with the file name. Always link to the root address. Your links on your site and any external links pointing to your site’s home page should be something like this:

<a href=”/”>Home</a>
<a href=”http://www.example.com/”>Home</a>

This is done so that the search engines don’t split your page rank to multiple web address of home page. If all the links are pointing to the root address (http://example.com) then all the page rank will be accumulated in the root address, which otherwise will split between the root address and the file name (http://www.example.com/index.html)

Use just “/” or the full url http://www.example.com. Both work the same way.

If you want external sites linking to your home page use the same “/” or full url http://www.example.com to accumulate maximum benefit of page rank.

Understand the importance of <H1> TAGS: The H1 tag is your second most important tag after your title tag, of course. Search engines like to see the heading tags because it helps them understand what the pages of your site are about. When title tags are reinforced with the same keyword as in H1 tag, you are more likely to improve your Search Engine Ranking.

WordPress for example puts the Title of the individual post into a H1 tag when listing snippets of multiple posts on one page. This would be the logical way to organize the content as it denotes content that is separate to each other, but related to the site topic.

<H1> Tag in a nutshell

•    Use keywords that relate to the page content in your heading tags
•    Have your keywords occur early in the tags
•    You can use more than one instance of an <H1> tag per page (e.g. wordpress)
•    Use multiple <H2> and <H3> tags where appropriate

Know more on h1 tags

Alt Tag is Important: Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on “website designing” labeling a sample website image as “sample website design” will increase your chance of being found. While labeling it as an “image” or screenshot will be of no help.

Some Useful Resources on Alt Tags:

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_no1.htm

SEO is not only for online marketers, as a front-end developer or a website designer on-page optimization is your responsibility. If you are not making a search engine friendly website then you are actually leaving your client with a job that has to be reworked later. Knowing a few basics but important SEO tips can add value to your skills.

Here are a few SEO guidelines that you as a web designer should follow:

Less Use of Flash: Now Google can index flash sites but this is true only for textual content in SWF files of all kinds. At present, Google only discovers and indexes textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, Google will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, it does not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Avoid a complete flash based site if you want search engines to recognize and index your site.

Source: Google Official Blogpost

Your site should upload fast: It’s mainly the size of the page that decides for download times, coupled with bandwidth. Though you can influence the bandwidth of your webservers, you cannot influence the bandwidth of your users. So make sure that your pages are no larger than they need to be.

You can reduce the size of web pages by:

Decreasing the size of your images:
• Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
• Use harder compression on your jpg images
• Make the images smaller in size
• Reduce the number of images
• Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

Click Here or Learn More Buttons: I hate these two buttons but it is one of the most common mistakes I find, when I review a site from SEO perspectives. Can anyone make me understand why the hell we use these words? Are we trying to optimize our site on key phrases “ Click Here” or “Learn More” ? If that is the case then I see no wrong in doing it but if not then please start utilizing these links. Tell user as well as search engine exactly where the link is going to take rather then saying click here. Use keywords in the anchor texts, it will help.

Note: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam.
If you have find this post useful come back tomorrow for more tips on the same topic: