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online marketing isresponse marketing , meaning that to design a web site is to respond to certainqueries posed online. Therefore you will be restricted to the demands of search-engine indexing criteria when creating a SEO optimized website You have to make your response loud and clear!

In this day and age's highly competitive online business worldyou can get far with a quite badly designed web site as long as it is optimized according to standards, just as you might fail completely with a fantastic 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 this is achieved through optimization!

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 Avoid duplicate content - this will be scanned by search-engines, and cause a "penalty" making it harder for the pages to rank. Use a canonical link. This allows you to give the main variant of a URL. If multuple URLs display the same content, the canonical link will tell the search-engines to scan only the "canonical", thus eliminating the problem! Place the most important content above the fold! People are impatient when reading online content, and are likely to read at most 30% of the content you have Online we are all scanners not readers. The content will, however, be scanned by seach-engines and contribute to your ranking. Keep in mind, though, that the scanning robots have a limited "patience" as well! There is no need to pack your pages with several hundred sentences Include a site map xml to facilitate the indexing. Use Meta robots to exclude content you don't want to have indexed by search-engines. Sometimes repeating content might be a way to get your point across to users, but the search-engines prefer to see it only once! Do not build a site entirely made in Flash, have the content you want indexed in html. Allow easy use of internal links in the copy. The web editor should be able to create a good internal link structure using keywords in anchor texts 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. Avoid (over)use of Ajax. As with Flash content you need to make sure that it is accessible via alternative coding. With altering Ajax content can be made crawlable. Include RSS feed on content that is "newsworthy". This alerts search engines (when correctly "pinged") to new content, and allows users to subscribe to your news. 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.Search-engines, like users, have no sympathy for a site bogged down with broken links. When changing urls, always use a 301 redirect to avoid duplicate content and to make sure that the links to the old URL now link to the new URL as you'd also want to keep the incoming links to your existing content The CMS should have editable meta information, headings, title-tags and links.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!