Eight Tips for Using Web Design to Consolidate Your Rankings

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May 26, 2011

While not so long ago Noosa used to be simple, the advent and rise of search engine optimization have changed the face of web design forever. Achieving good site exposure, a steady flow of visitors and good conversion rates purely by means of web design is much more complicated these days, so if you have been neglecting your SEO, now is the time to step up.

Here are a few ground rules you need to follow to help improve your site’s rankings with the search engines.

1. Before giving your site a visual makeover, optimize its code. Any ambitious web design undertaking should begin with analyzing and, if necessary, redressing the site’s code. Any tweaks here will help simplify the task of instilling the desired “look and feel” to the website. Additionally, using descriptive tags to structure your web pages will make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl and rate your content.

2. Less is more. Tempting as it may be, stuffing your site’s content with keywords and key phrases can be very detrimental, so avoid this practice at all costs. For best results, use keywords sparingly and strategically, in places like the URL, the title tag, main heading tags, etc.

3. Say no to Flash. Flash menus, animations and graphical menus may look good, but they are definitely not recommended for SEO. Search engines generally have trouble reading and understanding Flash files, so it would be pointless to trade your site’s search engine compatibility for a bunch of cool navigation effects.

4. Include alt attributes in image tags. Using alt attributes in image descriptions can be very helpful for SEO, considering each description normally contains keywords relevant to your business.

5. Assign each page a different name. Every page on your site should have its own unique title attribute, to avoid misleading the search engines. If you use the same title repeatedly, search engines will conclude that every page on your site is about the same thing, which would seriously affect your rankings.

6. Use specific link titles. Sunshine Coast websites are only as powerful as their links. To make the most of your Noosa web design and SEO campaigns, whenever you are linking to content similar to that on your website, make sure you assign highly relevant titles and descriptions to your links.

7. When using URL, aim for consistency. Before letting your website go live, determine whether you want to keep the www-prefix structure or not. Even if a site’s name remains unchanged, dropping the conventional www-prefix format could cause confusion among the search engines, which could lead to duplicate content issues regarding pages of the same website!

8. Make link building a top priority. Successful Sunshine Coast websites owe much of their exposure to effective link building. The larger the number of quality links you have leading to your website, the better your SERP ranking. Therefore, aim to make link building an ongoing effort.

Web Design