Designing a search engine friendly website! - SEO

What is the meaning of search engine friendly?


Search engines are funny creatures. They like certain sites and they do not like other websites. They are a little like women. They are hard to please and it takes time and effort to figure out why exactly they don’t like you. (Sorry all the women who are reading this.)

If Google for example, likes your site, your site will show up in the Google search results then you will start getting many visitors from Google. This always a good way for a site to get it’s first visitors. You want Google and other search engines to like your website. So you have to design it in a particular way so that you make it easier for the search engine to like you.



What do you mean?
You see, when a search engine first finds your site, it wants to know what your website is about. If they know what your website is about then they can display it when someone is searching for the information your website provides. So, to figure out what your website is about, they look at certain pars of your web page…like your title, heading etc. On seeing these things they know what your site is about so they can show your site when something related to your site is searched for.

So, when you design your website, make sure that you make it as easy as possible for the search engines to know what your website is about. This is called “SEO”, Search Engine Optimization.

There are whole companies who are dedicated to SEO and pleasing the search engines. SEO is a art and people are studying it all over the world. It’s like a business and a game to get your website to show up in the first page of the search results at Google.

There are some very important things you must do SEO wise while designing your website. But before we go into them, let us go into the concept of a “keyword”





What is a “keyword”?
When you have a website about “caps” for example, you want your website to be the website that shows up when some one goes to Google and types “caps”. If you have a website about health and a web page about “cancer” then you want this web page of your website to show up when someone goes to Google and searches for “cancer”. This is basically a keyword.

A keyword is the word that you want your website or web page to show up in the search results for. Search Engine Optimization is all about putting the “keywords” in the right paces when designing your site.


So when making your web pages, fists decide, “What is the key word for this web page? For what keyword should this page show up in the search results?”

Once you decide this follow the SEO guidelines:



The SEO web design guidelines:
Put the keyword once in the “title” tag of the page.

Put the keyword once or twice in the “description” tag of the web page. (By the way, you must unique title and description tags for all your pages.)

For all your pages, the heading of the page must be done though the “H1” tag. The keyword must be there in the H1 tag.

The file name of the web page must contain the keyword. For example, the keyword of a page is “lung cancer” then the file name must be “lung-cancer.html”

These are the basics of SEO. You should try and follow these rules. There is mush more to learn and I will tell you about it as we go along. For now, from the design point of view this is enough.

In some cases, it may be so that your visitors may get confused if you use a particular “keyword” in the heading etc. then DO NOT use the keyword just for SEO.

The VISITOR is more important. The VISITOR IS MOST IMPORTANT! DON’T CONFUSE THE VISITOR.

SEO is important, but don’t confuse the visitor. The visitor is more important.

(If you don’t know HTML, some of the above things might not be understood by you. Once you know HTML, this will make more sense. So go learn HTML)

Okay, once you follow all this, your pages should be ready and your website should be ready to go. So in the next section we will show you how to put your website on the Internet though free as well as paid hosting.