The first step towards effective search engine optimization is designing your pages to be search-engine friendly.
• Build a website for your users, not for the search engines.
• Keep in mind the basic rules of web design for searchers: site should be easy to read, navigate, and find; should be consistent in layout, design, and labeling, and should be quick to load.
• Do not neglect the basic rules of web design for crawlers: spider must be able to index text, follow links, and measure popularity.
• Need to accommodate searcher behavior
• 3 equal parts: keyword-rich text, site and page architecture, and high-quality external link development
• Usability tests will let you know if visitors can tell what your site is about
• If search engines can’t access your pages, those pages won’t rank
• Search engines can follow flash-based links but they’re not very good at it
• Flash pages are not search engine friendly and usually are not user friendly
• Look at the page load time after all your design is done, More images may slow down your web site to load
• People don’t come to a website to see how wonderful you are. They come to your website to see what you can do for them.
• Press release PDFs are ok on your site, but you have to optimize them the same as you would a webpage.
• You must communicate well with the engines so they can communicate well with the searchers.
