SEO for Web Designers

For the past several years I have been designing hundreds of websites never caring if those sites will ever be visited by people other than me and my clients. Then I was introduced by a friend about this relatively new industry where you get to promote the sites and gain website visits and good search engine visibility. This is when I decided to learn more about SEO.

What is SEO?

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, a process of improving a site’s traffic (people visiting your site) and rank from organic search engine results (the results you see on the left side on your screen). Some say that 80% of all Internet users use a search engine to find what they are looking for. Major search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). Wikipedia and Youtube are search engines for specialized search on information and video, but on this topic, we will focus on search engines that look for web pages outside their websites.

Search Engines rank websites by identifying which site they have indexed has matched the search query and rank them by popularity and relevance to the search keyword. Popularity is based by counting how many quality (good original content) and relevant (having similar topic with the linked site) sites are linking to that site. Relevance is also based on the overall content of the site whether it is about one single topic or about several different topics.

In Google, they have their own standards in determining your website’s worth. They call this Page Rank (named after Larry Page) which basically determines a web page’s popularity based on how many links from other sites it has as well as other factors like topic relevance, keyword frequency and much more. Yahoo and MSN (Live.com) use similar sets of rules but they differ on some criteria to prioritize when determining a popular site.

As a web designer, it is helpful for us to know what makes a search engine friendly site. Having a very beautiful and perfectly coded site is not good enough to get noticed online, you need to let others know that you exist first. Learning basic SEO will help us understand how search engines work and how we can improve our web design skills by using the right techniques to attract target audience.

How can I make my websites Search Engine Friendly?

• Content must be relevant to the rest of the page. Avoid mixing topics like guitar lessons and computer programming on one page.
• Add Targeted Keywords on your Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords.
• Use Header Tags (H1, H2, H3 etc) on headline and keyword targeted texts. You can use CSS to hide it from view (don’t use display:none) and show the graphical text as replacement.
• Use the Alt Attribute to describe an image. This helps get your image appear on Google Image Results and it is a recommended web accessibility rule.
• Use easy to remember and keyword rich URLs. For example, instead of naming your “how to cook adobo” page as http://www.website.com/page01.html, you can rename it as http://www.website.com/how-to-cook-adobo.html. You can use mod_rewrite especially for dynamic pages.
• Add rel=”nofollow” on outgoing links to avoid depleting your PageRank. You can add this on your link like this: <a href=”http://www.otherwebsite.com” rel=”nofollow”>link</a>
• Use robots.txt to restrict certain parts of your site from being crawled and indexed.
• Use 301 redirect to properly redirect pages to their new location.
• Use sitemaps (XML and HTML) especially for large websites.
• Use XHTML / CSS to rearrange content structure in the source code, without changing the look of the site.

Why bother making my designed sites SEO Friendly?

Unless you are already working on a popular site like cnn.com, your site is virtually unknown to the whole world. Aside from telling all your friends about your new site, making it SEO friendly and having it listed on other similar sites or directories will surely get more visitors from people who are looking for information or services you offer.

What good is a really great website if no one knows about it?

What sites to visit to learn more about SEO?

• SEO Philippines
• WEBCEO Internet Marketing Training and Certification
• SEOmoz Free and Paid Professional SEO Guides
• Blogger’s Guide to SEO
• SEO Solutions for Flash sites

Alfredo is a web designer, programmer and a search engine marketer from the Philippines. He is also an amateur photographer and loves to travel. He can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Questions? Send him an email.