While you are actually creating your web site is the right time to be sure that some basic SEO points are taken care of. It is a lot easier to add these important elements while the site is in the design stage than it is to have to go back later and add them. You don’t want to find out when you have submitted your site to search engines that you are missing some important tags or elements that will get you better ranking.
One basic item that is often overlooked is the name you give to each of the pages on your site. It is very important that every page doesn’t have the same name. This makes a search engine bot think that every page is the same. Make sure you name each page with a title that is relevant to what is on the page. If your page is about widgets, then make sure that the word ‘widget’ is in the title. And don’t forget those title tags.
Another important tag that is often overlooked is the alt tag. This tag is attached to every image on your site, and it is the one that shows a small text box when you place your cursor over the image. Search engines want to see these tags on every image. Forgetting them will lower your rank.
Don’t use an image instead of text. Search engines can’t read an image, so if you are using a little icon or pic for one of your navigation buttons, then the search engine bot will not be able to follow the link to the next page. It will register this as bad navigation, and again, this can lower your rank.
Try to stay away from flash. It may look really cool, but it is problematic for search engines, and for a lot of potential visitors as well. There are still a lot of people out there with slow computers or slow Internet connections that will not stick around to see a flash page load. Anything you can do to keep your pages loading faster is a good idea.
Take your time with your META tags. Make sure that they match each page. You do not want to have a bunch of keywords in a page’s META tags that do not correspond to text on the page. You want to make sure that the page description is not too long. Just make sure that your tags match your page.
Taking the time to keep track of the little things during the design of your site can save you a lot of headaches later.