SEO Website Design

Why is SEO website design vitally important? You don't put a web site online unless you want the world to come and check it out. The bad news: a web site that has not been properly optimized is unlikely to rank well on Google, even if you just put together the Sistine Chapel of all websites. The worse news is that HTML doesn't lend itself perfectly to optimization, and the more graphically advanced you get, the less likely your site is to be listed. The really good news: good SEO website design is not hard to learn, and even easier to implement.

Start with the statistics. About 70% of all traffic to the average web site, according to some analysts, comes from Google. That's not 70% of search engine traffic – that's ALL traffic. Yahoo, MSN, and smaller specialized sites like Stumbleupon account for a large proportion of the rest. But because Google has such a huge piece of the pie, most search engine optimizers choose to make their pages friendly to Google's search techniques.

Google and most other popular search engines use web spiders to crawl over the Net, looking at two things on each page: the text and the links into and out of the page. Using a secret algorithm, Google uses your page's text, links from other pages to you, and the anchor text in those links to give you a rating for specific keywords.

This marks a significant change from the old-style SEO website design. Before Google, keywords were embedded at the tops of pages, in metatags. If you wanted your page to rank well for discount web hosting, you came up with every conceivable search set for your search terms and put them in your metatags. Then you designed your page however you wanted: with text, pictures, video, movie, and/or Flash and similar technologies.

After Google achieved supremacy sometime around 2003 or 2004, optimizers started figuring out it was the text on the page that made their websites rank in the coveted top ten search returns. This totally changed the way pages were designed, and continues to change it today.

If you want to ensure good SEO web site design on your web hosting page – okay, on any page – try using the following techniques:

• Use minimal Flash, images, and video. Focus on putting more text on your page.
• Use tightly-written prose that uses your keywords about 2-4% of the time.
• Place your keyword into the title and headers of your text – if you never used headers to break up text before, start today.
• Ensure your keyword shows up in the first line of text, if at all possible.
• Include your keyword in caption text for images, and try to place it in the alt tags of images, videos, etc.
• Don't try to cheat by hiding text; Google will drop your page to the bottom for this and any other types of blackhat SEO.

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