1. Make sure your navigation is search-engine friendly. The simpler the navigation the better – if your users are confused, web crawlers will be as well. Sometimes making something simpler is harder work. Take the time to organize the website into only a few main pages, and then from there you can have as many subcategories as are needed. Link placement should make sense – do not try to shove links for every single corner of your site onto every single page. Go from broad to the more specific categories.
2. Some popular design features can be SEO disasters. JavaScript is confusing to search engines so try to avoid it, at least make sure those elements are worth any potential lost SEO opportunity. Do not replace word links with picture links. Web crawlers can’t read a picture. You can have a picture next to the embedded link of course, or make both a link.
3. Flash is bad. It’s super cool, yes, but search engines ignore it and users don’t like it that much either. Flash slows down connections and causes all kinds of problems for the end users. If search engines ignore Flash, many end-users despise it. Seriously weigh the benefits of Flash.
4. Optimize images. Make the file size as small as possible and title the image files “image” and then the relevant SEO keyword or phrase. Do not give images unrelated tags however, the tags must relate to the image. Google is onto that trick.
5. Clean code is placed higher in Google searches. For those who do their own coding, who are not using some type of program or template, the simpler the code the better. It also makes it easier to make changes later of course.
6. Make sure you have a site map. Google loves site maps.
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