Top 5 SEO Considerations When Designing a New Website

We just did a Google search for “top 5 SEO tips for new website” and got a bunch of blogs that were just paragraphs after paragraphs of boring information that we already knew!

I was looking for some organized and actionable data, where is the list of top 5 SEO considerations when designed a new website? Good news – you found it!

The 5 SEO Friendly Tips YOU MUST Consider

1. DON’T use FLASH or IMAGES as your ENTIRE site – Listen closely here, I’m not saying don’t use ANY Flash or ANY images (actually, please use both, for your readers sake!)…
   Search engines cannot crawl the text you see in Flash animations or in images. That is, if you can NOT highlight the text with your mouse cursor, then the search engine can’t see it – and won’t know what your site or page is about.
   There are some that say we should OCR the entire internet – but Matt Cutts @ Google says that would take a long time and that there would undoubtedly be errors… so just use text, ok?
2. DON’T keyword stuff your pages – That means, don’t stuff your title tag, meta keywords tag, and certainly don’t stuff the content on the page. In the title/meta tags, you don’t want more than 2 or 3 distinct key words/phrases per page.
   In the body of the page, you want to make sure your keyword density is sufficient but not overdone. Keyword density is a tricky subject – some say 10% is ok, others won’t go more than 5%, and those who venture above 20% get Google Slapped.
3. DO be descriptive and unique – Especially in your meta keywords/description tags, as well as the title tag. Google’s webmaster tips for SEO actually state the the meta description doesn’t help your rankings, and there is evidence that they also don’t consider the meta keywords tag either… BUT the meta description is what shows up in the search engine results page, so if it is well written, descriptive, and has a call-to-action (like, “read it here now” or “click here to find out more” or “buy it here today”), then users are more likely to visit your page over others (also, the keywords are highlighted in bold, so use them in the meta description for sure!). Also, just because Google doesn’t use meta tags for ranking website does NOT mean that other search engines don’t use them either (Yahoo!, AOL, Bing, Search.com, any of the directory or local rating/review sites, etc..).
4. DO use “title” and “alt” attributes – Typically the “title” attribute goes on links <a href=”…” title=”…”> and the “alt” attribute goes on pictures <img src=”…” alt=”…”>. You might be thinking, how is this a top 5 SEO consideration tip – and you are somewhat right because this suggestion is definitely for the usability of your website, but rest assured that the search engines take these attributes into consideration too. In short, the “title” attribute tells the reader what they can expect from the link they are hovering over, and the “alt” attribute shows up if the picture doesn’t load for one reason or another (and also shows up for the browsers that have a visually impaired software running).
5. DO use a CMS (content management system) – Such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or DotNetNuke. The reason for this is multi-fold: One is because the CMS will keep your HTML code neat and clean, which the search engine spider enjoys. Another reason is so that you can make edits to the site often, and for little or no cost. The days of calling your web designer to make an update or change to your website are over. With the content management systems of today, one can make edits to their site in a matter of seconds. This is good because the search engines like very much to find fresh, new, relevant content posted to a website frequently. This shows them that you are a leader in your industry, have a lot of knowledge to share, which is what they value most since search engines are in the INFORMATION business.

Did all of that make sense? We are trying to provide a useful resource to those looking for the top 5 SEO friendly considerations and tips for building or designing a new web site – so we really hope this was useful to you!

If you have any questions on what any of this stuff means, or want to discuss in further detail, don’t hesitate to contact us.