By : Admin

Having a wonderful web site design alone would take your website nowhere! A fantastic website only is not enough! You have to keep the search engine friendliness in mind while drafting a website. Web design and search engine optimization (SEO) should not be mutually exclusive. Webmasters should have a clear understanding of both design techniques and how the search engines work.

Incredible graphics on a website without any traffic will do little to fill the coffers. Follow these basic guidelines to ensure that your website is attractive and visited.

1. Navigation: Both humans and crawlers (search engines) need to be able to navigate your website. Avoid using technology that prohibits the search engine’s ability to spider web pages. The majority of search engines have the ability to follow the links on a website if you use standard HTML. Observe normal convention and make the links obvious and available to all website visitors.

2. Easy to Read: Fonts should be legible and webmasters should utilize white space judiciously. Text on the web page should be easy to read.

3. Speed: Avoid using overly large graphics that are slow to load. Remember you only have mere seconds to capture the visitors attention, do not waste precious seconds with web pages that are slow to load. Search engines too will become impatient and give up on your website if it takes too long to view the content. As a result you should avoid using free hosting services that might be unreliable or slow to respond if you receive any web traffic surges.

4. Consistency: Your website should maintain a consistent look and feel. In other words, all the pages on the website should have a similar look, color scheme and navigation.

5. Above the Fold: The most important information on your web page should appear above the fold. This implies that the website visitor should be able to view the most important content without having to use the scroll bar.

6. Contact Information: Include corporate contact information on the website. This lends your company credibility; anyone can pretend to be anyone or anything. Including contact information on a website shows that you are a serious and legitimate business entity.

7. Avoid JavaScript or Ajax: JavaScript and Ajax are cool, but they are not search friendly. It is best to stick with good old HTML. Search engines at this point are unable to spider the website contents that are displayed using JavaScript. This is also true of websites that are dynamically updated with Ajax. Chances are the body of your website will help your website rank well; do not waste the search engine opportunity by using JavaScript or Ajax.

8. Meta Data Matters: Each and every web page on the website should contain a unique title and description. Many search engines extract Meta data from the website header and use it to classify and categorize the web pages listing. The web page title and description should relate to the webpage contents.

9. Keywords Naturally: Use website keywords and keyword phrases in the web copy in a natural way. Search engines are starting to discern unnatural text, machine generated content and content that is cobbled together by a bot. Write your website’s content for humans not search engines.

10. Web Page Focus: Each web page on a website should focus on one or two keywords or keyword phrases, neither more nor less. The keywords should be incorporated into the Meta tags, and web copy.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review.

One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

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