Website Design Tips

Sebo Marketing has become experts at building and designing websites for high rankings. We have done tests, studied sites, and read tons of books and articles. As a result, we came up with some standards that need to be present for a site to do well. Some designs gave spiders problems. Others did not. But first, here is some basic information as an overview.

Website Design Tips - The GOAL

Website design is all about making the site easy for spiders, directories and humans to navigate.

You CANNOT optimize for one engine…you need to optimize for all the major engines. All engines have Primary and Secondary results. This means that they share information with each other. Even Google receives secondary results from DMOZ.

Your website pages need to:

1. be easy for the spiders to access the information on the page
2. quickly find the targeted keyword phrases on your site

Spiders:

1. Follow a link to a URL
2. Request the URL from your server
3. Record a list of words and phrases on that URL
4. Determine the weight or relevancy of each phrases “weight” on that particular URL. This process or “weight” is different for each search engine and makes up the search engines algorithm.
5. The results or relevancy gets indexed

Can’t you just submit your site to each search engine?

At one point, yes. But unfortunately, studies shows that as much as 95% of the submissions to the search engines are considered spam. It is better to have the spider find the page through normal processes. Get listed somewhere, let the spider follow the link, and then make it easy for the spider to make it through the site.

Website Design Tips: What are Spiders Looking For?

Here are some components that are known to be ESSENTIAL TO ALL search engines:

Text Component: The use of key words in strategic HTML tags and in the right places on the pages

Link Component: This is not links from other sites. This is the way the pages are linked together. Poor HTML coding can cause the spiders to get “stuck”. It is helpful to have two forms of navigation on a website: one that pleases target audience and one that please the Spiders. In other words, if we use JavaScript for the end user, we need to ALSO HAVE a “spider-friendly” navigation scheme

Popularity Component: This has two parts - 1) link popularity and 2) click-through rates

1. Link Popularity – the quality of the sites linking to your sites is much more important than the quantity of sites linking to you

2. Click-through – Major search engines are measuring your click-through rates in their search results, and how long the user is staying on your web site.

We hope these website design tips have been helpful, but realize that this is just the beginning of the key website design tips.

For more information about Sebo Marketing...