By: web design tutorial | posted in HTML/CSS, Tutorials, Web Design |
Date: August 30th, 2009
According to a recent poll, 12 000 web designers were asked “Do you think web designers required SEO?” 84% voted YES, 7% voted NO, and 9% don’t know anything about SEO. If you are among the 9% of the web designers that don’t know what SEO is, then this article will try to explain some of the basic things about SEO. This article will explain the do and don’t about SEO. Also the common mistakes made by many web designers and web developers.
Why you need to know about SEO?
1. SEO is not only for online web marketers. Web designers or the front-end web developers are responsible for SEO and how to setup web pages for SEO.
2. You probably lose a lot of traffic and visitors if your site is not search engines friendly. Keep in mind most people use search engines to search the internet, if your site is not search engines friendly, which mean you’re not listed on search engines high enough for people to find your site.
3. Also having SEO knowledge is a very valuable asset. You can sell your SEO knowledge to your clients.
How the search engines work?
Let’s start at talking about the most popular search engines online right now, Google and Yahoo. These are what you called crawler-based search engines. Each of the search engines have something called “web crawler” or “web spider” which crawl all the web pages and collect data on those pages. The main purpose for these “web crawler” and “web spider” are to read, collect information, and follow links for both external and internal links. After it collect all the information about the web page, it then store to the search engine database which is called the index.
When someone goes on Google or Yahoo and type in the search box and hit enter to search. That search query will go through the index and try to find the search that is the most relevant to your search input.
That is pretty much the very basic on how search engines work. When doing a search on Google or yahoo, it is using its search engine algorithm to determine which page is the most relevant and which are not. If there are many pages that are relevant from a single search, then that is where page rank comes in play. The higher the page rank, then the higher your page will get displayed in the search result.
SEO guide for designers and developers
Various search engines uses its’ own algorithm in ranking web pages. By having better understanding some of the basic of
the search engine algorithm will have a big affect on your page ranking and give you better search result. The SEO main
job has 2 aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.
SEO on-site: are things you can do directly on the pages like: fixing HTML, internal linking, target keywords, site structure, adding sitemap.xml, meta tags, title tags, validating your css and html, ect…
SEO off-site: are somethings you have less control over. Things like backlinks, domain age, anchor text on backlinks and ect…
Here is a secret on off-site SEO, if you do a great job on your web site by creating a beautiful design and optimized your pages for search engines and have lots of unique content with frequent updates, you will get a lot of back links. Because people would want to link to your site to read your content.
By: web design tutorial
Site:
Info:
W3C XHTML 1.0, 
W3C CSS
