On internet everybody is in hurry, you, as a web designer, should communicate why the visitor should spend time on your designed website. And this message should be communicated very FAST. Often, designers totally concentrate on the good outer look of the site and forget this goal. These are few things which every professional designers should keep in mind while designing the site. These tips not only improves search engine rankings but they also increases user interaction with the site thus higher conversions are achieved.

Page Titles: Often designers use WYSISYG editor, editors generally put a default title in the pages which is not relevant. So whenever you design a page make sure that you put appropriate titles that are relevant to the individual pages.

Meta Tags: There are generally 2 cases that occurs in relation to meta tags. Either the designers do not insert meta tags on the pages or they insert too many meta tags on the pages which does not offer any real benefit. There are, however, 3 meta tags which must be inserted in every page :-

• <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”application/xhtml+xml; charset=character set here” />
• <meta name=”Description” content=”small page description here” />
• <meta name=”Keywords” content=”keywords here” />

JavaScript Codes: Many a times it has been seen that designers put JavaScript codes in the source codes of the pages. If possible, put the JavaScript codes in a separate JavaScript file (.js extension) and include it in the html code.CSS: The styling of web page is recommended to be done in CSS. CSS has many advantage over traditional tags and it also offer cross browser compatibility without much modifications.

Frames or Not? : Never use frames. It is a strict no. what can be done through frames can also be done in conventional and much better way. Frames affect search engine crawlablity and thus reduces search engine rankings. Also web pages using frames are now being frowned upon.

Consistent Design: How will your visitors know they are still on your site if it’s pages are not consistent? You can guarantee consistency by placing navigation in the same place on each page and your logo in the same spot at the top of the page. If you have expandable menu items, put them on every page of your site in the same place. Your visitors will expect it to be there and it’s not user centered if they have to learn a new navigation system for each section. Use consistent navigation on every page. A different design and way to navigate it for each section is confusing. Also make sure that the breadcrump function is there. It improves user interaction and also improves the ranking by passing PR smoothly to each pages of the site.

Images with ALT and Title Tags: Every image tag you put in a web page should have alt and title attributes. Every alt tag should contain the description of the image. And image title tags should be used to increase the density and relevancy of the page.

Flash Content: Flash sites does not provide much options for optimizing. More over search spiders are having problems crawling flash content. So, a full flash site is never recommended. However flash elements can be embedded into html pages.

Validate the Pages: Validate the web pages to be 100% compliant with the latest W3C standards.

Relevancy: This is the most important element of the pages. As already discussed, on internet everybody is in hurry, you, as a web designer, should communicate why the visitor should spend time on your designed website. And this message should be communicated very FAST. Often, designers totally concentrate on the good outer look of the site and forget the relevancy thing. So, how to make a page relevant?. Just follow simple tips. Suppose you want to design a web page for “web design services”, for the document to be relevant you need to take care of four elements.

1. Title tag: Give the appropriate and unique title to the web page like “web design services’ will fit our example.
2. Meta Description: Now fill the meta description tag with the little description about the content that is going to be placed on the page
3. Meta Keywords: Put some relevant keywords in the page. Recommended but not necessary.
4. Content: Content is king. If the page is about web design services then write only about the web design services that you offer and nothing else. If your page is relevant, you visitor will stay else he will bounce to another website.

Site Structure: Site Structure is another important thing. So,how to design the structure of the site. Structure your site according to categories and sub categories. The main domain should contain the top category and then there should be subcategories and all the pages related to that subcategory should be placed in that folder. Remember the fact that any (I repeat any) page in the site should be just 2 clicks or a maximum of 3 clicks away from root index page. You will say, okay this is possible in small sites but how come is this possible in bigger sites. Read on:

Sitemap: Always make a sitemap. A good sitemap is one which allows visitors to reach any page on the site with just 2 or 3 clicks. And that’s why good sitemap increases rankings by providing deep crawl ability.

More and more people are moving to web. Web has become one of the biggest marketplace. Importance of web can no longer be under estimated. So,what happens when a market out grows??

You or your product will no longer be known to potential customers. The similar thing has happened in the offline world also. Suppose we have exceptional product or service, but nobody cares because they do not have the information about your product. This problem gave rise to a necessary evil we all know is now called advertising. without advertising a product is virtually dead.

Same is the case in online world. Generally if your site does not appear on the first page of the major search engines for your keywords, then you are definitely losing potential customers. To overcome this problem we perform SEO. In simple words, SEO is the process of optimizing your site so that it appears on the first page of major searcg engines like google, yahoo and msn etc for your selected keywords.

Keywords are the terms which people use to search for the required information in the major search engines.If we quote wikipedia

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results

If your site is not properly optimized, you will never be able to rank high in the search engines and That’s why i say SEO has become a necessary evil in the online world. What do you say?