How to Design your Site Keeping SEO in Mind?

February 4, 2011 - Last Modified: February 5, 2011 by Hyderali Shaikh 1,568

Design your site keeping SEO in mind, so that when search engine spiders crawl over your site they’ll not only look at your flashy images or scripts, but also your text content, navigation structure, site speed, heading tags, etc.

Below are some points you should keep in mind while designing your site.

1. Domain

If you are thinking that you can buy a domain with your keyword name so that search engines can position your site higher in serps, think again. Search engines doesn’t list the site on serp based on their domain name keyword but with the relevancy of that keyword which matches higher with those sites who are producing unique, relevant & accessible content.

2. URL Formation

Also, keep in mind that your URL should not start like this:

http://www.xyz.com/?_pageid14=1

But something like

http://www.xyz.com/product/diamonds-rings.htm

So that users can also understand which page they are visiting.

3. Use of Flash

I know you love birds flying, water flowing, balls jumping, blinking lights & more on your site so that users can visit your site & congratulate you on those flashy things. Do you want that visitor to see your flash and leave? No, nobody wants that if you are really serious about doing some business. Search engines can’t read flash & they are still fighting with the issue. They are in a process to redevelop their bots into flash-reading-mechanic-horses that we can see in future only. I’m not telling that you should not make your site without flash but use it as little as necessary.

4. Alternative Text on Images

Who doesn’t like images? In fact, “a picture can say thousand words.” Yes, I know that search engines bots don’t know what images are, but you can add Alt text in your images which can be readable indexable on SERP’s or Google Images, which can bring traffic to your site.

5. Heading Tags

I don’t know how much Google & other search engines take in account the heading tags factor, but there are around 200 – 1000 factors Google and others search engines consider while ranking your site. Heading or Header Tags consists of H1, H2, and H3 to H6 which is the last tag. Try to include your most important keyword in the H1 tag and others into H2 or H3. Don’t go beyond that.

6.Navigation Structure

Make your site easily navigable through other links within your site. Keep it simple, clean, and direct. I came across many sites in which their navigation lacked proper methods in being distinguished.

7. Pop-ups

I hate those sites which includes hidden pop-ups and jump in my face when I visit. Please, don’t include all these in your site. Your visitors will back off within a seconds.

8. Content

Do not indulge in any illegal activity like copying content from others and blatantly pasting it in your site. Google has come across this unethical way of copying content, and one can file a case against you for such incidents. Write your own content relating to your business if you can’t hire a content writer who can write it for you.

9. Sitemap Page

I saw thousands of sites who still don’t have sitemap pages. Sitemaps don’t help in ranking your site, but suppose you have hundreds of products or services, and your visitors don’t find them on your site. Your sitemap page can be helpful for them because you’ve listed all your products or services in that page. That can also be helpful for bots to index those pages which they didn’t find on your site.

10. Site Speed

In 2010, only Google introduced this factor of Site Speed to rank your site high on SERP’s. Big G is considering how much time your site takes in loading, which is a good move because if you site is in flash then don’t expect your site to land in higher positions. Design your site with less script and don’t use heavy images. You can view your site speed in Webmaster Tools. You can also use Pingdom, which checks each and every page of your site.

Those are my views on designing a site while keeping SEO in mind. What other things you consider while designing your site? Please share in comments if I missed something.

About Hyderali Shaikh

Follow @hyderali_

Hyderali is a SEO Analyst at Channel Frog. He loves babbling about SEO, analytics, blogging, SEM, social media etc.

{ 66 Responses }

John Allen says:

Apart from a slow loading site one thing that totally annoys visitors to a site are those pop ups that appear whenever you visit. You might be in a hurry to get some particular information and such things will only annoy you or rather make you leave for another site.
Darren says:

I'm always amazed when I see web designers blatantly stealing content from other websites as if it's no big deal and there will be no repercussions, and many of them call themselves SEOs. And for the keyword in the domain issue, I think Google made it easier to rank with that strategy but I think that might be reversed soon as so many web designers are abusing it.
Darlene says:

I agree with the use of flash. A little may be fine, depending on your type of business but I have seen graphic designers that have had their sites created completely in flash. Why? Why not consider replacing flash with jquery? No, it is not exactly alike but it works well. Anyways, I didn't read all of the comments, but wouldn't you consider Title and Description to be important? I know I read somewhere yesterday that people don't think Description is that important anymore, but I believe good Titles are. You have lots of comments so I am sure this has all been covered by now.
Anne Sales says:

Hello Hyderali, I don't think you have missed anything. A couple of those you mentioned were not known to me before. Although, I have submitted a sitemap to Google, but I don't know how to make one. I see some sites with a link to their sitemap and I wonder how to do it. Also with the title tag, is it okay to use H1 several times in a post? Thank you and I will be waiting in anticipation for your reply.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Anne for your comment. To create a sitemap try XML-Sitemaps.com through which you can get your sitemap then upload it in the root folder of your site, once done go in your google webmaster tools & follow the instructions. Well, you should use H1 to your most important keyword on a page & provide h2 to other keywords don't go beyond that. Nobody knows how much google considers this heading but it is also an important on-page factor. Hope it helps.
James Johnston says:

Thanks for sharing this information. I had thought about sharing something like this as well. The information here will definitely help others out. As a designer and SEO consultant, I end of working on older sites or new sites that were designed in a way that were unfriendly to the search engines and even to its users. I honestly do not understand why designers would create a site like this. When I design a site from scratch, I always try and make a site SEO friendly or at least design it in a way an SEO consultant can go back and add the SEO if I am not doing it. I hate flash, I know flash and could design a site if needed. But I will do my best to avoid it. There are only a few sites that can use flash and those site mite Movies and well known Music bands sites. Sites like those get their traffic from being famous. As for Flash not being SEO friendly, its true it is not, but I talke dto several professional flash designers and they say you can make a Flash site SEO friendly. But isn't cheap.
Shazan Sayani says:

Nice post.. Next post will be on off-page ? waiting for that too !!!
Mavis Nong says:

Hi Hyderali, This is SEO made simple! Anyone can follow these easy tips to build a search engine optimised site. Thanks for sharing. All the best, Mavis
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Mavis. Yes, anyone can used this tips to designed their site seo optimized.
Morgan says:

Step-by-step, EASY guide to SEO. I'll refer a lot of clients to this post. Spot on! #2 alone is one of the best kept SEO "secrets" that most people just don't know how to do properly, so I love that you mentioned it here. Cheers!
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Morgan, Yes, url formation is very important as we can show our visitors on which landing page they are visiting & also it is easier to google to list that url in serps.
Extreme John says:

So many bloggers forget the importance of getting that site map in place and doing it quickly. great tips as always.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Extreme John :)
Tuan says:

Thanks for the tips, Hyderaly. Those are reasons why we need to hire designers or purchase premium themes for our websites.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Tuan.
Val says:

Nice tips overall, useful for beginners, and nothing that could hurt them (much). A small nitpick about Flash: there's nothing wrong about using it where necessary. One just should not implement the whole navigation scheme in Flash. Also, on any page that uses it, make sure there is enough text content to please the readers without Flash and the search engines. Pop-ups are just a personal rant and have little to do with SEO. They can actually be very useful to get more subscribers, so maybe it's a bad idea to discourage webmasters from using them so strictly. I think they should test and see how more bounces vs. more subscriptions work out with their audience. And, as Lennart pointed out, a few truly essential elements are missing: title tags, description tags and link text. These should be at top spots, along with H1 tags. Still a useful article, and beginner-friendly.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Val for the tip, Flash to the whole homepage should be discouraged. Also, pop-ups have to do little in seo but for your user who visited to your site to get something but if you'll throw some big Pop-ups on their face they can't wait for one sec though.
Karen Marrow says:

Hyderalis, This is great information you share here. You covered everything I am doing, so thanks for the confirmation. Karen
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Karen.
Nasrul Hanis says:

You got useful points there, Hyderali! I visited some sites with unnecessary elements for examples, as you mentioned - a lot of disturbing Flash animations and popups. I admit that I done some of the things that you mentioned above in the past, and yeah.. after I'd done a few tests and getting feedbacks.. most readers/prospects/visitors are absolutely looking for our content and the message that we want to convey to them. Thanks Hyderali for sharing with us!
- hyderalis says:
  
  Great Nasrul, that you have followed the same path as I explained above for your site. As you saw from your experience that visitors like your site because you've shown them that content with simple & effective designs whereas others are still going for disturbing flash & popups.
ZK says:

Google and Matt certainly like description tags. So do not forget to provide those details as well.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Yes Zak, Title tags & Descriptions Tags are very important in your site but here I explained about designing your site with seo in mind I'll make follow up of this post "What to do after designing your site for SEO?"
  - ZK says:
    
    You can also count as description tags as the website designing. Because this one you should put in your header coding segment.
Murlu says:

Keywords and content, that pretty much does it for me because if you can offer up great content for people to dig through and they can find it in search engines based on your keywords, you're already on top of your game - it's just doing a bit of backlinking from there and you're gold!
- ZK says:
  
  To make delicious food you should add everything in right amount. This is the same case in blog or site business.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Yes Murlu, without content your is site is worthless. Those content should also be your own not copied from others as I explained above then definitely with the help of backlinks you can win the rank race.
Garen says:

Also pepper your keywords in strong tags, italics, and underline them. I tend to do this every 100-150 words or so. Don't overdo it because Google could see it as spam if you go overboard. Garen
- hyderalis says:
  
  Garen keywords in strong & italics is also one of the factors of Google Algo but they tend to share very little amount of percentage while ranking but its advisable to do some of your keyword you never know what google can do.
Robert Dempsey says:

Hi Hyderali, I'd add navigation to your list too. Having navigation that gets people where they want to go makes the site more usable, which Google likes.
- ZK says:
  
  Yes in your website visitors are like strangers so you should and you must show them the way. Otherwise they will feel like they lost. I saw this kind of thing in many websites and blogs.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Robert, you are right navigation also plays an important role in designing because when visitors arrives at your site they'd like see some other services which they can through proper navigation.
Dennis Edell says:

Pop-ups - The new subscription pop ups seem to be all the rage, what do you think of those?
- Darren Scott Monroe says:
  
  Dennis it depends on your niche. Some niches (non money making niches) get turned off by that like say the photography niche. But then several music business niches do very well. In the money making niche it is best to set to say 5-15 seconds because most of us see it coming LOL. And make it as original as possible. Also be prepared for a backup gameplan. Because 2 years ago people were against them now 2 years later they as you say are all the rage. So you KNOW whats going to happen right?? LOL
  - Dennis Edell says:
    
    Right on the money my friend. ;-)
  - hyderalis says:
    
    Yes Darren, you are right but also if you'd like pop-ups then those should be of your site feedback which should come after 5 to 8 mins once the user gone through your site that may explain where your site is lacking with their positive or negative response.
    - Darren Monroe says:
      
      Respectfully I disagree. There is NO WAY I would advise anyone to have a popup show "5-8 minutes" in ANY niche. Complete waste of time . within 20 seconds at the most in any niche. PS I think you read it wrong... my site isn't lacking anything.
      - hyderalis says:
        
        Darren, I think you get it wrong I wasn't talking about your site. Your site is pretty good :)
        
        Darren Monroe says:
        
        Oh OK so forgive the confusion H. I was trying to understand what site you were referring to.
Juliemarg says:

I agree with Hyderali's tip about domain name - Google announced about 2 weeks ago that exact match and keyword urls were being downgraded as factors. This is part of the fight against spam.
- ZK says:
  
  Would love to see that resource Julie.
TJ McDowell says:

I'm a little confused by your first tip where you said "search engines doesn’t list the site on serp based on their domain name keyword ", but that is almost certainly a signal that search engines use. I'm thinking your point may have been that this isn't the only signal that search engines use, but I'm not sure exactly what your point was there.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Yes, you are right it's not only the signals to used while ranking your site on serps as if it is than many other's may have done the same by booking the keyword domain name to get high positions.
tushar says:

thanks for the share hyderalis... i am too too bad at seo and this post is very helpful for me..a full guide for newbies i have bookmarked it...
- ZK says:
  
  With this you should also try to get the quality and relevant backlinks. You can start with the article submission (this one is really effective). Just build the strategy and you can also hire other people for this.
  - hyderalis says:
    
    Yes ZK, after designing your site you should also drive traffic to your site through effective link building method which I'll post here soon.
    - ZK says:
      
      Yes we would love to hear that one ... as I am sure that article will be also good like this one. Eagerly waiting ...
      - hyderalis says:
        
        Yeah ZK, publishing that post here soon :)
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Tushar :)
Peter from Blogging Mechanics says:

In one word - Simple! If you want to get high search engine rankings your website should be simple. If you go to Matt Cutts blog, you will see how simple it is - no fancy plugins, no bunch of images or other stuff, simple blog.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Yes peter, simple but also attractive. Matt Cutts doesn't provide any services to people he just write over there some of his tips & share it with people. But if you are providing services or products you don't have to make the site simple but effective & attractive too. People may come to your site not just for only reading your content but how you've organize your content in such a manner that they tend to buy your services or products. Thanks.
Andreas says:

A good idea to increase site loading speed in many browsers, which in turn also helps regarding SEO, is to split large images into several smaller pieces. Also check all your javascripts during your next site review, maybe you some of them are no longer needed or updates are available.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks linknami for the Tip.
Shailender says:

Yeah! site loading speed also play vital role in site ranking so you need to concentrate on it as well. Best ways to control it you have already mentioned in the post including reducing the usage of photos etc.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Yes Shailender, site speed nowadays is very crucial as search engines are getting strict on this. Visitors are not in a mood to wait for even a minute if your site doesn't get open fast. Therefore, usage of flash, heavy photos should be ignored.
Nathan says:

Thanks for the tips. For someone just starting out everything can be a bit overwhelming. I'll keep your suggestions in mind while building my site.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Nathan, I'm glad that you like my tips.
Lennart Heleander says:

Hi Hyderalis, I you only look at what are important for the real SEO so is the 6 biggest thing; Keyword in URL, Keyword in Title tag, Keyword in Domain name, Keyword in body text, Keyword in H1, H2 and H3, Links with Anchor text with your keywords in. And around 200 -300 other also important thing to do to get the right and perfect SEO.
- hyderalis says:
  
  Yes, Lennart there are around 200 to 1000 factors which are important to get perfect SEO. Though, I can't write each & every factor therefore I wrote some of the best & important to look while designing your site for SEO.
  - Lennart Heleander says:
    
    Hi Hyderalis, Yes, We can booths be agree that its many factors which are important to get the perfect page or blog in SEO, and your list have take up many of the important thing to start with.
    - hyderalis says:
      
      Thanks Again.
- Dennis Edell says:
  
  That's 8 or more depending how many H-tags one uses, do you rally want that many keywords in one post/ isn't there a percentage you're supposed to watch?
Alex says:

Hello Hyderali, If you want a seo website you need to keep in mind that bots need to see the content. So if you are using flash, you would better add some paragraphs that get replaced with javascript when you add the flash or something similar. Also, many website now use ajax to server their content. This is an other issue because search engines can't execute javascript and if you're content is only accessible through javascript requests you will most likely end up with an empty page in the search engines. I think, your tips cover the rest, great one Hyderali!
- hyderalis says:
  
  Thanks Alex, yes you are right search engines along with flash hate javascripts.

How to Design your Site Keeping SEO in Mind?

1. Domain

2. URL Formation

3. Use of Flash

4. Alternative Text on Images

5. Heading Tags

6.Navigation Structure

7. Pop-ups

8. Content

9. Sitemap Page

10. Site Speed

About Hyderali Shaikh

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1. Domain

2. URL Formation

3. Use of Flash

4. Alternative Text on Images

5. Heading Tags

6.Navigation Structure

7. Pop-ups

8. Content

9. Sitemap Page

10. Site Speed

About Hyderali Shaikh

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