Make a Website Work
Make Your Site Easier to Find
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a popular catch phrase to mean a wide variety of things, but the main idea is that your site should be search engine friendly and not contain any road blocks to prevent search engines from crawling your site.
Text, Not Images
Your content should be text, not images of text. Search engines can't read the text within an image, so if your entire page is just an image of paragraphs of text, your content is essentially non-existent to search engines. Below is an example of an image of text:
It may look deceptively like normal text, but you should be able to see a difference when you move your cursor over or try to highlight the image vs. real text. Keep this in mind when selecting a web designer. Most designers correctly use text, but there are some exceptions. (Also worth noting is that with images of text, only the person with the image source file will be able to update the content.)
Images of text are acceptable for logos and navigational menu items, but for the latter, include the menu item titles in the image names (separated by hypens if more than one word) and use alt tags.
Alt Tags for Images
Alt tags are helpful by displaying text in place of images for the visually impaired and in the case your images don't show up, and also offer an opportunity to include a few more keywords. Using alt tags is just a good practice overall.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Not Tables
This is related to how a web designer codes a website. Tables have been used in the past (and are still in use) to manipulate the placement of elements on a page. Often, tables within tables are used, which adds unnecessary code. Downfalls of tables to control page layout:
- Important site content can be missed when search engines parse a limited amount of code per page
- Increase in file size and load time of your pages
- Not flexible for major site changes (or even some minor ones)
Not all tables are bad - the proper way to use them is when organizing data for a chart or similar purpose.
Title & Meta Tags
Each page should have a unique title and meta description tag specific to the content of the page. The meta keywords tag is suggested, but the importance of this tag varies by search engine.
The title tag is what appears as the title in your browser or browser tab. The title tag is one of the most important elements search engines look at and should be short and to the point. Try to keep it under 9 words; 5 words is better.
The meta description tag defines the short summary shown under your title tag on a search results page. Use this opportunity to convince the user that they should click on your website because you have the what they're looking for.
The meta keywords tag allows you to list key phrases that you'd like your website to show up for, but only some search engines take this information into consideration. It doesn't hurt to put a few unique keywords for each specific page, so try to fill this one in too if possible.
Next up » How to Drive Traffic to a Website
