online marketing isresponse marketing , meaning that to create a web site is to respond to certaindemands posed online. Therefore you will be restricted to the demands of search-engine indexing criteria when designing an optimal website.You have to make your response loud and clear!

Nowadays in an exceptionally competitive online business environmentyou can get far with a quite poorly designed web site as long as it is optimized according to standards, just as you might fail completely with an amazing looking site because you did not follow the rule book on how search-engine spiders crawl and index sites. Getting your message across is your most important communication strategy, and SEO design is how to do just that!

Web owners and designers that are SEO knowledgeable will have a big advantage as they will, without a doubt drive more traffic to and generate more business for their sites than their competitors This article intends to share with site owners and web designers the necessary steps to an optimal web site

The following is a checklist for creating a SEO optimized website

Start by creating a vertical directory structure that supports the hierarchy of the keywords you want to achieve high ranking for in search:

Develop static pages with unique urls Do not allow duplicate content! Search robots scan this and will devaluate each page on your site that is duplicate. Use a canonical link. This allows you to give the main variant of a URL. If the same content is indexed and visible through multiple URLs as a result of session IDs or tracking tags etc., the canonical link will override these and eliminate duplicate content issues. Place the most important content above the fold!People are lazy when assessing online content, most users are not likely to scroll down to read everything you want to communicate. Online we are all scanners not readers. Search engines do, however, "read" everything and like to see a reasonable amount of relevant content. Include a site map xml to ease search-engine indexing. Use Meta robots to exclude content you don't want to have indexed by search-engines. On occasion it is good usability to repeat content to remind visitors what you are about. Search engines don't need this, and should only "see" your content once! Do not build a site entirely made in Flash, have the content you want indexed in html. Make it an easy task introducing internal links in the content! A web editor need to be allowed to work on anchor texts that are in line with the structure for your kewyword use on pages. Do not use images for navigation, use html text. Keywords in links communicate to the search-engines what pages are important for which keywords. Use keywords in navigation elements. Optimize alt-tags, use "important keyword" instead of "picture 1" . Make sure that the site is visible also with javascript disabled. Check out Google's guidelines for Ajax. Up until recently Ajax coding would cause a problem for search engine indexing. Include RSS feed on content that is "newsworthy". This encourage not only user subscriptions, but also quicker indexing and more frequent crawling by search-engines. Use W3C compliant code, make sure the loading time is fast. Do not use frames for pages that you want to be "seen" by the robots. Build a custom 404 page. Ensure that there are no broken links.Both users and search engines alike will shun a site that is plagued with dead links! When changing urls, always use a 301 redirect to make certain that old URLs keep passing "link juice" to the new ones, and that no duplicate content is indexed. The CMS must handle title-tags, headings, anchor-texts etc. independently. The web-editor should always be allowed to have access to the most important SEO content elements.Being flexible is a key factor in any kind of online development. Take advantage of Firefox for practical SEO tools and plug-ins.

Have a search-engine friendly design solution Website owners will benefit greatly from having a first things first strategy for their web building project. Starting with a site architecture that is based on extensive keyword research, and then go through the checklist with developers to ensure that the result of painstaking planning and smart ideas will, in fact, be visible and well ranked!