Website optimization: your site can be attractive and SEO friendly.

Remember that famous phrase from the movie Field of Dreams? “If you build it, they will come.” From an SEO web development perspective, this could not be further from the truth. The line would have to be, “If you build it to be SEO friendly, they will come.”

So, just how do you build an SEO friendly website? Here we will cover a few of the basics that are essential for developing an effective SEO website.

Your site does not need Flash to be flashy.

Simply put, Flash looks cool, but Flash is not your friend for website optimization. Search engines cannot see or index Flash content, so it is a bad idea to build an entire website in Flash. So bad, in fact, that this practice is commonly known as “SEO suicide.”

Avoid using Flash in your navigational menus as well. Many of the same Flash menu effects can now be accomplished with CSS and XHTML. The best SEO friendly sites are simple, clean, and employ the “less is more” principle of design.

Content is king for website optimization.

When it comes to content, more is definitely more. An SEO friendly website needs fresh, regular content added to attract both visitors and the search engines. Your content should be relevant to your visitors, unique, and keyword-rich.

Keywords are key in SEO web development.

Content is only important if it includes keywords that your target audience will be searching for; otherwise, how will they find your site?

Keywords should be included not only in your site’s content, but also in your URLs and your title, description and keyword meta tags. Keyword research, the process of determining what keywords to use, is one of the most important, and sometimes underestimated, aspects of SEO web development. Check out this excellent guide to keyword research to help jump start your website optimization.

Achieve search engine friendly web design with CSS.

CSS (cascading style sheets) is an important tool in creating search engine friendly web design. CSS streamlines the amount of code needed to produce a page, resulting in a quicker page load time. And unlike designing with traditional html and tables, you have the freedom to put the most important part of your page, the content, at the top of the code, so the search engines will find it faster and easier.

Use alternate text for all images when building your SEO website.

The search engines can’t see your images, so it is most important that you include “alt text” for all of your images, using keywords whenever possible.

Developing a search engine friendly web design simply requires a common sense approach.

Taking a little extra time to craft your SEO website will be well worth it in the end. Your extra effort will pay off when the website that you’ve so carefully designed not only looks good, but also shows up on those first few results pages of the search engines!

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