9 Points In Web Site Design - By: Lee MacRae

Designing your web site properly is where you start search engine optimization. And that starts before you actually have the web site online. It can be a real problem if you set your site up and then realize you to need add a few extra things, which may now interfere with the design or appearance itself.

Sit down and list or sketch out the various things you want and will need:

1. Install some type of analytics package. If you have a stats package such as Awstats on your web host, that may be all you need. If not, you may need one that will have to be integrated into your site. Stats collected in these types of programs are important to know who visits you, the keywords they use, the pages they enter and leave on and more.

2. Develop a header or logo that catches the eye of your visitor. This is a part of branding your web site.

3. Be sure you will have enough text on your web pages to make sure the search engines know what your site is about. If you develop a site that is too image heavy you may not have enough relevant information for the search engines to know where to index you, They may not put you under the keywords you want to rank for. Remember that while these images may let people know what you are all about, that won't do any good if they can't find you. Besides, heavey graphics make a site slow loading and can frustrate visitors into leaving.

4. Make sure you plan to always write unique page titles and appropriate meta tags or descriptions for each page. Notice EACH page...this makes each page stand out and each has a unique selling point for the information on that page.

5. Make sure your web site structure is easily expanded to fit in new information that will eventually appear. And the structure should enable you to redirect pages easily whenever something has to be adjusted down the road.

6. Use CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] to allow easy changes to the design of the web site but leave the information intact. This is extremely important should you ever want to change the appearance of your site and makes is very easy. CSS sheets also eleminates messy code that could interfer with the search engine spiders crawling your site.

7. You MUST have a privacy page, a contact page and an about us page at the very least. The major search engines expect legitimate web sites to have these and you could be tossed in with the spam we sites if you don't have them.

8. Make sure the fonts you use are easy to read and that most people will have them installed. It does no good to find a fancy font that no one has on their computer. When they visit your site and their browser can't find that font...it will substitute one it does have, ruining the intended appearance you worked so hard to put together. Most people will have Microsoft Sans Serif, Arial Black, Franklin Gothic Medium, Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial...the common ones. Use those. And don't use colored fonts on colored backgrounds...you can drive your visitors crazy. Use white background and black text. Blue text can also work but stay conventional.

9. Keep important information above the fold...that term comes from print media where the most important information is on the top half of the page. You don't want your visitors having to scroll down to find the most important info you have, especially on the first page where first impressions are important. And the more people have to scroll down long copy the more likely they are to leave.

Those are 9 points to focus on in designing your web site. There are other things you can do but these will give you a great start in both search engine optimization as well as search engine marketing.

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