When designing your website you should give careful consideration as to how website visitors will find you. Your answer will be the dominating factor in the design and structure of your site. If you build your website first and then try to develop traffic you will be missing out on some key design ingredients.
If you are going to rely on traffic from listings in major search engines then you should give careful consideration to the keywords that potential visitors will input at the search engines website. Once you have a list of appropriate keywords for your website research those keywords thoroughly in each of the major search engines and determine how crowded those categories are. Narrow down your keywords and be as specific as possible to insure that relevant traffic reaches you.
Content contained in your website should match the keywords you use. The names you select for folders in your directory should also relate to the content they will contain. The same is true for naming files. Match the filename to the content they contain. Naming a file “mortgage_rates.html” which resides in a directory named “home_financing” is much more specific and lets the search engines know exactly what the content is to be expected upon further review. Use the underscore key in naming files and directories to separate words. Your goal in this aspect of design is to make sure you communicate with the search engines as to what the content of your website is and to do this without bombarding them with the same keyword presentation hundreds of times.
When a search engine visits your website decisions will be automatically made on how to categorize your website and where your website belongs in the search engine results page. Your website will be compared to similar websites to help insure that users of the search engine receive relevant results when searching. One factor to consider is that search engines do not read graphics, flash presentations or images. They skip over them. It’s therefore critical that your website contain an appropriate balance of images and text. To help search engines you should use the alt tag in your html coding of every image in your website. The text contained in the alt tag is read by search engines and it’s also displayed to visitors of your website that have graphics turned off. The alt tag should give an accurate brief description of what the viewer would see if they could see the graphics.
Looking for an advanced design tip? If you want to see what a search engine sees when they visit your website take a moment to open up your browser and turn images and graphics off. This can be done through the Tools menu in Internet Explorer. Select Internet Options, Advanced and then clear the checkboxes for Show Pictures, Play Animations & Play Videos. Then preview your website. The content displayed is what the search engine sees. The search engine also sees the meta tags, file names. robots.txt file and directory structure. Do the same thing for your competitors that have achieved a ranking in the top ten of the search engine results page for the individual keywords you selected.
One facet of website design never seems to change: content that is relevant to your website and updated draws traffic. Your main concern should always be the content and it’s relevancy for the user.
Source : articlecity
