Website Design
Website Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine listings are how visitors find your site. Someone once said that there are over 6 billion web sites on the net, that's one for every person on the planet! Imagine the size of the directory you would need to list all these sites.
Search Engines like Yahoo, MSN Search, AltaVista and the mighty Google trawl through the net indexing all the content from the pages found, creating incredibly sophisticated databases with this data.
Most of the sites on the net are garbage! Sorry, that's my opinion and not an official statement. There are hundreds of thousands of 'Link Farms' which just display lists of links in the mistaken belief that Google and other search engines will be fooled into thinking that because a site has a lot of links into it, then the site must be a good resource. That may have been so in the early days of search engine technology but it is not true today. In fact most search engines including Google will punish sites found on these sites.
Do not pay anyone who says they can get you to the top of the Google listings. It can only be done by the following methods:
- Good quality content on your site
- Text based HTML documents
- Original site content
- Correct use Of Metatags, Titles, Descriptions etc.
- XML Site Mapping
- Proper document flow
- Good quality links in
- Organic growth of links in
- Maturity of the web site
- W3C validation
- Good quality, relevant links out
Keywords
I have seen many sites where the designers stuff the keywords metatags full of the keywords they hope Google will index. This is great for me when I am researching Pay Per Click campaigns for clients as their competitors have given me a list of the carefully researched keywords. Unfortunately for them Google has been ignoring this metatag data for years! We no longer use tables for web page design, we use CSS style sheets to format our pages and so can produce semantically correct documents that can be styled for use on any browser or platform.
Table Based Design
Sites designed using tables for layout still dominate the web. Google and other search engines read web pages just like us humans, they start at the top and read down. If the text is jumbled up in tables then it will not achieve the ranking it deserves. See the section on Document Flow for more information on this.