SEO is not only for online marketers, as a front-end developer or a website designer on-page optimization is your responsibility. If you are not making a search engine friendly website then you are actually leaving your client with a job that has to be reworked later. Knowing a few basics but important SEO tips can add value to your skills.
Here are a few SEO guidelines that you as a web designer should follow:
Less Use of Flash: Now Google can index flash sites but this is true only for textual content in SWF files of all kinds. At present, Google only discovers and indexes textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, Google will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, it does not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Avoid a complete flash based site if you want search engines to recognize and index your site.
Source: Google Official Blogpost
Your site should upload fast: It’s mainly the size of the page that decides for download times, coupled with bandwidth. Though you can influence the bandwidth of your webservers, you cannot influence the bandwidth of your users. So make sure that your pages are no larger than they need to be.
You can reduce the size of web pages by:
Decreasing the size of your images:
• Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
• Use harder compression on your jpg images
• Make the images smaller in size
• Reduce the number of images
• Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%
Click Here or Learn More Buttons: I hate these two buttons but it is one of the most common mistakes I find, when I review a site from SEO perspectives. Can anyone make me understand why the hell we use these words? Are we trying to optimize our site on key phrases “ Click Here” or “Learn More” ? If that is the case then I see no wrong in doing it but if not then please start utilizing these links. Tell user as well as search engine exactly where the link is going to take rather then saying click here. Use keywords in the anchor texts, it will help.
Note: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam.
If you have find this post useful come back tomorrow for more tips on the same topic:
