In website development process there a plenty of aspects that should be taken into account. One of them is, for sure, SEO – Search Engine Optimization. There are a lot of tools created for widely known content management systems (CMS) that will enable you to adjust SEO links the easy way, as well as to edit them. However, if you are working with a website that lacks such options, then you’ll have to get it on and do it yourself.

It is very advisable that each and every web designer possesses the basic knowledge of SEO. How many designer think about SEO when working on a page layout? How many web designers really know the importance of web ranking? How many of them knows that overusing Ajax can impact one web page’s ranking negatively?

Each web designer and web developer should know SEO. OK, not all the secrets behind SEO, but certainly, having a basic knowledge of this can help you with job, as well as with maximizing your clients’ satisfaction.

To explain SEO in one single article is near impossible, but there are few tips, tools and advice for one web page’s fine optimization that anyone can apply.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

This is a must! Google webmaster central has the top of the line tools that will help you increase the number of visitors on your website.

You can upload your website’s map site in .xml format, monitor your website, keywords, ranking and other numerous factors that impact your web page’s visitors count. If you are developing a website, I recommend you to register an Google account and use it.

Find true keywords

Finding the real keywords that truly describe what your web page contains is one of SEO’s main courses. It is quite often that users themselves will give a good guidance on keywords, but there are numerous tools to be found all over the Internet that can help you find real keywords for your website. One of them is Google AdWords Keywords Planner.

This tool is used a lot and to apply it to your website it is compulsory to have Google AdWords account (you can use your webmaster tools account as well).

Keywords or key-phrases?

SEO world is constantly changing or, rather, evolving, with keywords and meta tags significance definitely dying off. Internet users are also evolving, so as a result keyphrases are gaining momentum in usage.

Choose the right domain

Domain choice is one extremely important thing. To put it better, it is important to have at least one keyword in your domain. This will increase the page rank for that one keyword. Try to choose a domain name while pondering the keywords to use to promote your website. You can read a few tips on this link. If all of this seems to be too much for you, we are here for you, our experts will help you choose the right domain for yourself when registering it.

Google trends

Google trends is another tool which makes for an awesome way of following search trends within the country your website operates in.

Title tag

Title tag is the most important tag – keywords and keyphrases should be contained within this tag. Title should not be longer than 60 characters and should be used to describe a web page; keyword relevance in title is highly important for most browsers.

Write a brief, but quality description for every page and try to explain the purpose of that page. This is not that important for the ranking, but should definitely be taken into consideration because it can help increase the number of visitors and attract more people.

Layout and SEO

Can layout influence web page ranking? Yes, it can. So you should pay attention when creating a layout and memorize the first rule of SEO: content rules!

Two column classic layout is ideal for SEO! It gives priority to content and in source code sidebar goes right after content. This is one of the reasons why WordPress has become a search engine friendly blog.

Write a functional and semantically accurate code

A correct and semantically punctual code helps Google crawlers to read and interpret a web page with more success. The end result is a better ranking for your website.

Id or class names within <div> are very important and relevant, so always try to use the right name. For instance:

<div id="header"></div>

is way better than

<div id="head"></div>

For navigational menu, it is much better to use:

<div id="nav"></div>

rather than

<div id="meni"></div>

Use the alt option for images, type in a brief description or at least picture’s name, and always use the <ul> tag for menu:

<ul>

<li><a href=”#”>text link</a></li>

<li><a href=”#”>text link</a></li>

<li><a href=”#”>text link</a></li>

</ul>

Use headers, h1, h2, h3, em and bold for keywords. This does not mean you should apply these on every word in your article, but to apply a suitable style to a simple text. For instance, use h1 tags for a title and never for an entire paragraph, just as well the span tag list in menu, as shown above, should not be used.

Create a good internal link structure, page linking and use the anchor text (visible part of a link on a page) as a keyword.

<a href="about" title="Najbolji hosting u regionu">Adriahost</a>

Anchor text is very important, as well as title, so try to use keywords in it, whenever possible.

Speed

Quick page load can assist the bot when indexing a page in its base. Clean code, compression of images and external requests can influence the web page speed and bot indexing.

Avoid the splash page

Unless utterly necessary, avoid the splah page.

Flash and Ajax

Too much Flash or Ajax can lead to lower rankings. Try not to use these technologies in a wrong way.

Conclusion

This article is merely a brief overview of the vast world of SEO. It is not sufficient to explain the complexity of it, of what it represents and how to implement it on a web page. The purpose of this article is to induce readers to take SEO into account before starting their next big project.