Website Design for better Search-Engine Ranking
Main Pages / Intro Pages
In recent days, a lot of designers thought that splash pages (Flash pages mainly used for intro pages) where cool and give positive impression. Now, I suggest that Splash pages are not used. You may ask why? Let me explain, the Main Page is at the top of the hierarchy of a website, which means that when searching on the net, search-engines need to explore further down in the hierarchy to find any match to the search query. It is also a known fact that Search-Engines do not index flash property therefore any information on the Intro or Main page is a lost opportunity to rank in search-engines.
Navigations / Menus
Optimized Navigation Menus are an essential part for search-engine optimization, and therefore we must be very careful and attentive. Graphical text (images), JavaScript, Flash Menus and Slicing, are all attractive ways to create navigations for the reader, but definitely not for search-engines. Search-engine spider crawlers cannot read through all the above mentioned which would mean that all the links within the menu are lost, plus any other important link anchor text (a link's given title) which may be considered as keywords. A way to go around graphical images, ALT tags may help to keep keywords read by search-engine spider crawlers. Of course the best way would be to build navigation based totally on links, to read more about this, read the previous blog article Optimizing Web Site Structure for most search-engine . Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can help in making navigation links look visually attractive without jeopardizing search-engine ranking.
Head Meta Tags
In order to optimize every page uniquely, every page must have different Title, Description, and keyword Tags with the appropriate keywords to match the page’s content. Specific keywords according to the page, must be uniquely inserted and emphasised within the content. If all pages have same keywords in all meta tags, search-engines will assume that keywords are just being bulked up to trick search-engine algorithms, which of course will affect negatively on the page's PageRank. To read more about Keywords, Meta Tags and others, read the previous article regarding Keyword Suggestions for Search-Engine Optimization .
HTML
Make sure all HTML is validated with W3C , any errors might effect what search-engines think of your website. Warning on the other hand are not penaltized.
Page Content
Avoid Duplicate content or similar content on different pages or sub-domain. Content similar to other pages or also other websites may be considered as plagiarism. Search-engine algorithms cannot identify who copied who, so it will simply exclude the page from search-results. Meta tags must also avoid duplicate keywords as explained above.