Web Design – On-Site SEO Tips

Having a website is a great tool for any business. It opens the door to a larger market. But a website without traffic is useless. One of the main ways to get traffic online is via search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the three main ones. To do so there are a few changes needed on the website so it can rank well. It is best to have these on-site SEO changes done during web design for better performance.

Title Tag

I often come across pages having "HOMEpage" or similar words as their page title, this is wrong. Page title is one of the most important aspects of on-site SEO. Having a descriptive title for all pages of your website is requested. Avoid using same title for all pages. Also some search engines use the page title to display in results, it is required to have your keywords in the beginning of your page title.

Meta Description Tag

Many say this is useless but this is going to prove them wrong. Google uses the description tag in its results. If you happen not to have meta description tags, Google will take some random text from the page to display which may not appeal to potential users. So, description tag can be taken as an optimized sales copy, make full use of it.

Page URL

It is best to have page URLs which are very descriptive (eg a page about Honda cars on a car website will perform best if in this format carstuff.com/honda/car-model.html).

Image Alt Tags

Use 'alt' tags for all your images. The image name should also be descriptive. Search engines can not read images. Optimized images can be listed in image searches and become a potential source of new users to your website.

If you follow the above tips during web design, you can consider the hard part of SEO done. It will not take very long for your website to start ranking. Of course, there are other on-site SEO techniques that have to be combined for better performance.