what are the designing techniques to make website search engine friendly?

[williamutley]

Hi

this is all about web designing....

If i want to start a new website, what are the things to consider so that it will make a search engine friendly? what are the designing techniques?

hope somebody here could share ideas...

many thanks...

[Chris]

Did you read the SEO Guide on this site?

[deathshadow]

SEO has NOTHING to do with design techniques, and everything to do with CODING techniques.

The best approach is called 'semantic markup' - if something is a header, use a heading tag... if something is a paragraph, wrap it in paragraph tags... Put your document structure IN the logical order of headings and content it would be if you were writing it as a normal document and not a website. Do NOT throw tags and classes at everything in sight "because you can" - keep the markup minimal, it's less for the search engines to wade through and as a bonus increases accessability.

VALIDATE your code. While many browsers will parse bad/broken/crap HTML just fine without even throwing an error, some search engines will just throw up their hands and walk away when they encounter bad/buggy markup - or worse mistake markup for content and vice-versa.

Have content people WANT to visit... Too many websites can be classified as 'polishing a turd' - with SEO trickery being said buffing compound. Getting people to your site is one thing, having them do a dry chuckle pissed off that you managed to rank high while having no content of value or no content of value unless you pay for it (experts exchange anyone?). Developing value and visitor retention can often be more important.

Minimalist Semantic Markup, with separation of presentation from content, and content of VALUE will do more for your site's health overall than an entire truckload of black hat SEO chicanery, trickery and other sleazeball bull.

If you do want to talk 'design techniques' - REVERSE your order of planning and designing a website. Start out NOT in some goof assed paint program or WYSIWYG, and in a plain text editor mark up your page as described above with NO concern for the final layout or appearance, and ALL emphasis placed on markin up the content as what it is, NOT how it will appear. Once you have the entire page semantically marked up, then and only then use CSS to create the layout bending the markup to your will, avoiding adding code to the HTML as much as possible.... THEN AND ONLY THEN do you start up your paint program of choice to create graphics to hang on the layout.

The 'content first' approach guarantees simpler site maintennance, ease of reskinning the site, and if you use semantic markup properly you'll get better indexing results as well as better graceful degredation on less capable user agents.