Online to please your visitors and convert them into customers, you can neither possibly overlook the phenomenal significance of search engines (like Google, Yahoo, MSN), nor forget the natural emphasis of your end users for good looks and informative feel. You target optimum conversion rate for maximum web traffic, translating into two imperatives as regards your website design - it must be user-friendly and search engine friendly.
Before you design your website, research some 100 highly targeted keywords relevant to your website business and zero down to keywords that are often-used but produce lesser number of competing websites. While too many keywords may squeeze away the meaningfulness and finesse of the information from a user’s point of view, it may well declare the web page as ‘doorway pages’ to the search engines due to excessive optimization for higher ranking.
Look and organization of your website invariably influence the interest and impression of your end users, as well as, help search engine spiders rank your website. While images enhance user experience, they may also slow website’s download time. You must make sure that images are used only when meaningful. Keeping the graphics/images less and light, with due use of alt tag including short descriptions, is advisable. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) aid consistent layout, as well as, overall updating later.
Keyword optimized meta and heading tags, with crisp titles and descriptions, also help attract consequential search-engine attention.
It is indispensable to ensure that the organization of your site is hierarchically logical and consistent. It is advisable to include a site map if your site has more than 10 pages. It is also wise to stick to obvious descriptions/titles for navigation buttons/tools. It is an absolute must that all internal web pages sport a link to the homepage. This also increases the number of links pointing to your home page.
it is a good idea to write concise HTML code and keep the lengthy javascript codes in external files, to enable search engine spiders scan content rather than code. It is also advisable to insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of each web page to keep them compliant with browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac and IE6/Win. Healthy user experience and higher ranking among SERPs are highly interrelated. Search engine algorithms place natural importance to popularity for ranking. In short, easy to navigate and easy to use web design is a search-engine friendly web design!