When websites are being put together the sad truth is that often very little thought gets given to the SEO side of things. There are all too many beautiful looking website that will never see the light of their day in the sun because they are simply not calibrated to be picked up in any way in search engines.

This article sets out a few of the basics to help website designers to get it right from the very beginning, ensuring that further down the line clients aren’t left with the need to overhaul their website once again because it has only been seen a few times and mostly by themselves.

The first major step is to ensure that URLs are wholeheartedly search engine friendly. If they are made up mostly of weird characters and number combinations then they are automatically set at a disadvantage to other websites with descriptive, keyword rich URLs.

Secondly there is the issue of meta-data, and it is here that all too many developers get it wrong. Just to clear the situation up once and for all; each page on a website must allow for the addition of unique meta data in order to clearly express to search engines what the page is about and what your keyword targets are for the page. Having one hundred pages each with the same meta-data or with no meta-data at all means having 100 pages that will not rank successfully in search engines. Additionally, it’s important to build in the ability to amend meta-data as and when needed to allow for changes in the future.

The third most important aspect of website design from an SEO point of view is the on-page optimization. There is a lot to take into account here, but in terms of the basics, try to aim to have keyword rich h1 header tags on each page, make sure you’ve got a good amount of text that can be indexed by any search engine algorithm and ensure that is has a reasonable number of references to keywords that you are targeting with the page; mark up images with descriptive and, where appropriate, keyword rich alt tags and link internally using in-text keyword targeted links.

While navigation is something that website designers often excel at, leveraging the navigation for SEO agency purposes rarely gets much of a look in. Navigation buttons must be text based if they are to convey any relevance factors to the pages that they direct to, and obviously keywords should be used where appropriate to fine tube the syntax of the relevance.

Finally, web design agencies should also give a great deal of forethought to the coding that they employ in the development of a website. Making sure that it is light and easy to amend will definitely help in terms of search engine optimization. Additionally, thought needs to be given to the reduction of webpage load times, as search engines now take this into account in their algorithm. Make sure that image files are minimized to their lowest possible kilobyte and ensure that a page makes only one DNS request for CSS or JavaScript files.

In essence it all comes down to making the site relevant to keywords and phrases, quick to load and easy to navigate. Get all of these things right from the start and you’ll put yourself in a great position to start to achieve beneficial search engine rankings.