How to design a "search engine friendly" website

There are several things that you can do to make your site "friendly" to the search engines, especially Google. First of all, make effective use of your page's title Meta Tag. Choose a title that reflects your business and includes 2 or 3 of your primary keywords.

For example, the title of our site is:"Custom website design for small business in Cumbria. Rural Web Design"

This title has 5 of our most important keywords in it: Custom - Website - Design - Cumbria and Business .

Another very important Meta Tag is the description The description tag shouldn't contain just a list of key words. It should be a logical sentence that contains your keywords. Again, we'll use our description as an example: "Custom web site design and marketing from Rural Web Design in Cumbria"

This description contains our primary keywords yet it reads like a coherent sentence.

In order to make it very easy for the search engine spiders to crawl your site, if possible place links to all of your pages on your home page as well as every other page on your site. Also create a Site Map page and link to it directly from your home page. On your Site Map page place links to every other page in your website. This guarantees that every page on your website can be reached with a maximum of two mouse clicks or "link follows" by the spiders.

Near the top of your page, you should use your primary keywords in an <H1> header tag. Google gives extra weight to text located within header tags when computing PR. Also use a couple of <H2> tags on your page because they count as well (although not as much as the <H1>.

Photos do not help your ranking. But you can use <ALT> tags to describe your photos. If you can use a keyword or two in your <ALT> tag that is even better. but be careful here that your <ALT> tag accurately describes the photo or Google may consider it to be SPAM which of course is not good. Here is an example of an <ALT> tag:

<img src="applebasket.gif" ALT="Basket of apples ">

<ALT> tags are intended to give a description of a photo in cases where the web browser either cannot display photos, the photo display option has been turned off or the visitor is using a screen reader. If you use these tags properly, your site's visitors will be able to see the description of an un-displayed photo (a good thing). But even more importantly your <ALT> tags will help your search engine ranking.