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5 tips for web designers and developers to optimize site for search engines

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Dharmendra Chahar
5 tips for web designers and developers to optimize site for search engines

All web designers and developers have many things to do when it’s about building a website. Where it starts from creating a layout with clean code so the site can pass all validation and become error/bug-free. But the most important thing for any web designer or web developer is that they should take care of search engine optimization, Read more here. Here I am giving some useful tips on how you can do better with SEO while designing or developing any site.

Avoid heavy images in the website

No doubt, if you are adding many images it will lead you to a heavy design and that can cause your visitors to wait a lot for load time and no one likes to wait in this fast era. Google also emphasizes page speed factor in terms of load time. With modern CSS2 and CSS3, you can give all advanced effects using drop shadows, gradients etc. which reduces the use of the images. If it is necessary to use many images in a webpage then design it accordingly so that you can repeat it using CSS.

Never Design navigation links using images

One of the easiest ways Google finds for crawling any website is to read anchor text of a text and if you are using images for any navigation link, then Google won’t be able to read it as it will do in anchor texts. Advance CSS can mostly replace the use of images on a website, so always there is a second option to use CSS and better to avoid images.

Put CSS and JS files into one document

If you are putting all JS files and CSS files separate, it will slightly increase the load time of your website. When a page loads, all the documents used under the head tag needs to be called from server every time when page loads, so if you are putting files together then it will surely decrease the time of page load, doing that page has to make just a call for each file type and meanwhile you are decreasing the page load time.

Header tags should be near the top of code

According to theories, contents that are near to the top of an HTML document carries more weight than any other areas like the footer. You must have properly used H1 tags for titles of content, as this is the only term which indicates the title of the content and this is the place that you are trying to rank for.

Make use of CSS Sprites

Google itself recommends web designers and developers to use a great tool named ‘SpriteMe’ with Greta results, you may have to spend some time to know how it works but using CSS sprites is the best way to combine images and use them with CSS which decreases the load time.

 

Other than above 5 tips for search engine optimization, there are a lot of stuff that should be taken care of while building any site. Read more Essential Elements for Successful Business Website. Also, you should never use text-indent to -9999px to trick search engines as Google has stated several times to avoid these and use an alt tag instead.

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Dharmendra Chahar
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