SEO Web Design - An important decisive factor for search engine ranking

Targeting the top slot in search engines and aspiring to rank one of your web pages in the top ten of Google is the goal in mind of every business owner. The number of web pages on the mesh is increasing at an exponential rate, so the competition for page one in Google, Yahoo or Bing will get tougher. The rankings on major search engines are usually based on algorithms. SEO web design is essential for high search engine listings i.e. for producing top 10 results.

There are components to be considered to reach the top rank in the major search engines. Some of these components have been discussed here.

Meta Tag Optimization: Stuffing keywords in the title, description and on the page is an old concept. This will not help you in reaching the top slot. Stuffing keywords in the Meta tags is not a great idea. The title of the content should be short and crisp. Trying to stuff every possible keyword in one long title cannot ensure high ranking. If you are still following the age old concept, it is time to switch to the new technique. It is actually the quality of the content that decides the number of clicks.

The Description Tag: You can rank for a keyword in the title of the page or in the body of the text or in the description tag, depending upon the strength of your website. The combination of these on-page factors determines the ranking potential within each search engine. These different approaches have their own criteria for awarding relevance and relative positioning when a query is generated. The web page description should be concise. If you are aiming to rank for a specific term, having the exact match form of that key phrase in your title and description augments your ranking potential for that term. You need to place the keywords strategically. The keywords with a higher priority should be placed at the beginning of the sentence and the number of characters should not exceed more than 250. If you use short and crisp sentences, the visitors would get an idea what they can expect once they arrive at a particular website. Moreover, this kind of presentation works wonders for web bots and search engine spiders that place a great deal of emphasis on the words in the title or in description data.

Optimizing your hyperlinks: Hyperlinks can be used for internal purposes or for external purposes i.e. for linking to another website. If the links are leaving your website and going to another site, they are considered forward links. On the other hand, if your website receives a link from another site, they are called back links. The way the strength of a link is evaluated is from the anchor text or text containing the link states. An optimized version of the links would contain a keyword which has tremendous worth in search engines when referencing what the topic of the page the link leads to, in addition to the ranking potential of the page that the link is located on.

The other important components that decide the ranking of a website are as given below:

• Optimization of Alt Tags/ Alternative Text Tags: Alt tags enable webmasters to create a clear description of what the contents of the image are.
• Optimization of your Website Content: The quality of the content decides the rank of the website in search engines.
• Site maps - A site map is essentially an index of the pages comprising your website.

These are some of the basic fundamentals of SEO Web Design that you need to apply to the web pages to optimize them using the techniques that search engines are keen to respond to.