What is ‘Search Engine Friendly’ web design? It means that special care is taken to ensure your website can be easily scanned and indexed by search engines. A search engine friendly websites allows search engines to easily jump from page to page of your website, read your website content, determine what keywords are relevant to your website, and then deliver search results accordingly. This is absolutely critical if ranking well in the search engines is important to you. It doesn’t mean that your website WILL rank well (there are many other factors that will influence this) – but it’s a great start: it means that your website CAN rank well and that there are no hurdles preventing it from doing so.

Search engine friendly web design is a very important element of search engine optimisation.
The 10 effective ways of Search Engine Friendly Web Design

1. Title tags should be UNIQUEYour website title tags should uniquely identify the content on any given page – title tags give search engines the first clue as to what this page is about. If you have an ecommerce website, then every single product page should have a unique title tag – ask your web developer to make sure this is generated automatically for you, it can make a big difference to ranking well for individual product names.
2. Make sure your website is easy to navigateYour menu should be obvious (at the top of the page) and straight forward. Avoid flash and javascript, desired mouse over effects should be able to be achieved using css. If you have a lot of deep level pages, then make sure you setup a sitemap and link to it from your home page so that the search engines can easy find it.
3. Content should be well structured and keyword richJust like users, Search engines like useful heading tags, bullet points, highlighted words and keyword rich content.
4. Be aware of keyword ‘cannibalization’This is when you target the same keywords across many different pages. In doing so, you water down the value of the keywords on any particular page and search engines can have trouble determining which page to display to searchers.
5. Update RegularlyA cms (content management system) or blog will enable you to keep your website up-to-date with fresh content. The more relevant the content you add, the more likely you will build natural links from other websites – link building is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization. By adding new content regularly, you also boost your keyword combinations and increase the chances of visitors finding you via long tail searches (search phrases that are typically longer and more specific than normal).
6. Clean layouts work bestThe cleaner the coding of your website, the easier it is for search engines to access your website content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for design implementation and all scripts should be contained in external files.
7. Avoid the excessive use of FLASH.There are many obstacles to achieving search engine friendliness in Flash websites, so use it sparingly. Flash can be great for creating some eye-catching ads or dynamic flair to your website but should not be heavily used.
8. Avoid embedding text in imagesSearch engines can’t read text that appears in an image – so you’re better off displaying your content in real text wherever possible. When it is necessary to embed text in images then ALT tags can be used to describe the content to search engines
9. Meaningful directory and file namesSomething like: www.clothes.com/jeans/levis/ is a lot more meaningful to search engines than www.clothes.com/index.php?cat=10&id=12. Your keywords should be included in directory and file names – this is another thing you can ask you web developer to generate automatically for you, it’s well worth the effort!
10. Link to your domain, not index.phpEvery-time you display a link to your home page, you should link to your full domain, not the file name. The number of pages linking to your home page (both external and internal) is an important element of seo, you don’t want to divide the total number of incoming links to your home page between 2 different links!

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Web templates provide ready-made codes that you can customize with ease. Now, you can forget about hiring a web designer that can cost you more or less a $100 per design. You can save a lot of money, plus you can give your creative juice some needed exercise.

Cost of Web Site Templates

It’s a good thing that you can get simple web templates for free on the Internet. These free templates are suitable for beginners. You can use them for your personal page or small business. Paid templates can also be very helpful and you can get awesome templates at just around $25-$75. These templates are reusable and can give your site a professional look.

Choosing Web Templates

When you are deciding on which web template to pick, keep these three things in mind:

1. What is your website for? (business, personal, community site, etc.)
2. Who are your would-be visitors? (students, adult, shoppers, etc.)
3. What do you want to project? (informative, funky, serious, etc.)

If your website is for your personal page, then anything goes. That’s the easiest type of website to make since most of the design would largely depend on what you want it to be. The only thing to consider is if your website is a mirror of you, it is YOUR site anyway. If you have a hobby, say fishing, then you can go for a naval theme. Adding your personal style to your site would simply do the trick. (more…)