Page Layout
Simple is what surfers and search engines want. Text content
should out weight the html content and images.
Text near the top of the page is more important than the
rest
of the page. Having layouts, which have little
space for content and links, will reduce your
placement in search engines.
All pages must have the same basic layout; Home page can
be organized differently then other pages. Your layout
should
have a room for multiple themes especially in your home
page.
This will give you the opportunity of increasing your
keyword density. Formatting of content
using header tags enhances your search engine placement.
Your website must have a clear navigation scheme because
search crawlers will follow links.
Text or Images
Designers often like to use images but search engines
primarily use the text on the page when they index a page.
Having a text rich site
is always a bonus if you are aiming to
top the search engines. Text content in your site tells
the search
engine spiders what your site is all about. It is also
good for your website's visitors to find more relevant
content.
If they find your website useful, they will visit it again.
Limit the use of graphics and use ALT text and keyword-friendly
file/image names.
Flash
The main thing that you need to know
is that flash text and other rich media sources are not
always recognizable to
search engines so spiders would not know what actually
you want to promote on your website. Mix Flash with HTML
to create a search engine friendly page layout. Have
a small flash like on the header.
You can also use of DHTML to replace plug-in content like
Flash.
Frames
Avoid using frames in your website.
Either they
are partially crawled by spiders or
sometimes spiders don’t crawl them at all.
Tables and layers
You can't create an attractive website without tables/layers
but... the less the better.
JavaScript
Spiders will find it difficult
to crawl JavaScript links in your site. Links should be made
in plain text. If you
use JavaScript links then spiders will not index all those
pages. To get better rankings, you have to get more pages
crawled and indexed in search engines.
CSS
Using Cascading
Style Sheets can keep your html code clean for
search engines.
Also it is easy to update or make ganges
to your website if you use CSS.
*None of the search engines
are automatically spidering CSS files at the
present time.
Download time
Download time
is important to your users as well as for search
engine visibility. When a search engine robot requests
a web
page from your server,
if the page takes too long to download, the search
engine might not add the page to the index.
PDF
Google index PDF files. All new version of Adobe Acrobat allow you to add meta tags to PDF documents.
Keywords
Identify your keywords, use no more then 3 keywords
per page. Better yet use one keyword and combine it with
some other words to create valuable two- and three-word
key phrases (example: "widgets", "blue
widgets", "nice blue widgets").
It is important that your page title is as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top keywords (generally fewer than 12 words total). Websites that include the dominant search terms in the META title and META description tags have a higher ranking and a higher click through rate than those that do not. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into your web page copy. This is important for a search engine that does not reference META tags. You want to use these phrases without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Also, try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.
You must also have keywords throughout your body section. We recommend that you have at least 400 words of sentence-structured
grammatically correct content on every page. You must also have your keywords appear as the most common phrases on your pages.
Text links
You also need to link pages together using the keywords. Use them in the link text on the page from which you link and in page name on the page to what you link. This is very important.
Use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related (if the topics are not related, use image links).
links to your website
Find the websites that link to your competitors and ask
them to link to your site. Use your main keywords when
preparing a copy for exchanging links.
Many websites that offer web design or web templates does not really create search engine friendly sites.