How To Design Search Engine Friendly Pages

It may have been true in the movie “Field of Dreams,” but on the Internet the phrase “build it and they will come” is simply nonsense. You could have the best looking website with all the bells and whistles… heck, it could even be the best converting page ever, but it’s not going to do you any good if you don’t get any visitors in the first place. Read more

Some Good Design Practices

Your website is the storefront of your business  — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

1. Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
2. Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
3. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big (usually no more than 4-5 lines). This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
4. In addition to that, don’t let your website be too wide. Our eyes have a very small focal point and to have to constantly scan across an entire screen becomes tiresome. You’ll lose the visitor’s attention very quickly.
5. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
6. Avoid using javascript languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use javascript  to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that. Most importantly, search engines are unable to read javascript!
7. Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go. We use CSS on all of our sites we create – even this one.

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This article was written by Dallas’ rankaboveothers.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.