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Hooked Web Design is the online home of Nabil Sayagh, a creative freelance web designer and web developer based in Long Island New York. As a web designer, I am passionate about web design and website development, branding and advertising material, and i thrive on designing simple, clean attractive websites that fully comply with today’s XHTML web standards for my clients. My team and i are located all over Long Island, New York, and our primary expertise is in front end web design; XHTML, CSS, Web Design Standards, Javascript, and over all user experience.

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Best Search Engine Optimization Practices

Posted in: Blog, Search Engine Optimization by admin on April 22, 2009

You built a website, and it looks great. One question remains though… How could you generate traffic?

You can do so by following three different paths:

  • Built it and then worry about search engine optimization.
  • Start with content then design the website around it.
  • Built your website hand in hand with search engine optimization.

    • As an experienced webmaster and website designer, i did it all, but found out that the best method is the last. It just saves you valuable time and get you to meet your traffic quotas.

    Now the second question that comes to mind is how can one build a website with search engine optimization in mind? The answer lies within the way search engines rank your website.

    Search engines rank your website based on many factors, and i will go over the 4 primary key ones.

  • Your Website code.
  • Your website’s architecture.
  • Your website’s content.
  • Establishing Link popularity.

    • Let’s break down each one of these factors and see how you can help search engines index and rank your website high and fast.

    Website Code:

    1) Title Tags:

    Your website must use unique and accurate title tags for each one of your websites’ pages. This tag is extremely important because it will appear in all the search result. It helps users and search engines alike determine the relevancy of your pages within a particular search query. Your title tags have to be as descriptive as possible and include some of your web page’s keywords.

    2) Meta Description Tags:

    Your META descriptions give search engines a breakdown of what your pages are about. Try to make them as informative and relevant to the users as well as the search engines as possible.

    3) Meta Keywords:

    Your META keywords must not be broad and must have a good breakdown.

    4) Use of 301 redirects and htaccess files:

    Your website should use 301 redirects and .htaccess files. The reason behind this is, search engines will consider http://www.example.com and http://example.com as two different websites. This will lead to duplicate content in search engines and might cause your website to be penalized. 301 redirects and .htaccess will make that distinction obsolete.

    Website Architecture:

    1) Website Navigation:

    Website navigation is important in search engine optimization because it allows visitors find the content they are searching for, and helps search engines understand your website’s structure. Adding CSS menu navigation, text links, and webpage breadcrumbs will make crawling your website much easier to search engines.

    2) The use of XML Sitemaps:

    Creating SEO friendly XML sitemaps will ensure search engines finding important pages on your website. There are many tools that will help with this, and one of my favorite tools to use is RAGE Sitemap Automator. You should also include your sitemap’s location on your robot.txt files.

    3) Using SEO friendly URLs:

    Using SEO friendly urls will also ensure better crawling by search engines and better site organization. including relevant keywords in your urls display better and ranks higher in search engines. You can find many tutorials out there on how to create SEO friendly urls. In the coming days i will try to post a tutorial on how to achieve this purpose.

    Website Content:

    1) Content:

    Creating compelling and useful content is an extremely important step in search engine optimization and improving your search engine visibility. High search engine ranking rarely comes without good content. It must also be keyword rich content. your keyword density should be set between 3% to 5% and your content language should be natural. MR GOOGLE is getting a lot smarter these days!

    As an example let’s say that you content has 100 words. Then, according to this formula, your key keywords should be represented 3 to 5 times in your page.

    It is also important to update your website’s content to increase the number of visits by search engine crawlers and spiders. You can achieve this by increasing you content, blog posts, use of social media such as Facebook and Myspace, email campaigns, and other more…

    Establishing Link Popularity:

    Link Submission:

    Using directories such as DMOZ and any related niche web directory will lead to these directories indexing your website and hence help improve your website’s visibility.

    Text Link Exchange Programs:

    Exchanging text link with other highly ranking websites will send your website’s popularity to new heights and therefore achieve higher search engine rankings.

    Thats all Folks!!!