7 Tips for Designing Websites
 

1. Web design is not print design

2. Consistency is key

3. Web users read in an F shaped pattern.

4. Keep your website layout clean and easy to navigate

5. Use CSS not tables

6. Remember the fold

7. Look at web design galleries for inspiration. Some of the best galleries are CSS Beauty, CSS Container, and my favorite - Design Meltdown.

 
3 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips
 
8. Google PageRank considers the quality of your website’s content and relevancy to search terms

9. Search engines analyze the quality of your site by the number of links to your site and how strong the PageRank of sites that link to you are.

10. Relevancy is determined by how dedicated you are to a search term. Prime ways to show strong relevancy are your domain name, how often keywords are included in your content, and title tags.

Helpful Resources for web design beginners:
Web Style Guide - Detailed intro to designing professional layouts
Programming Tutorials - Useful beginner tutorials on HTML, CSS, and a number of other
Best Practices for Title Tags -  Discusses how to brainstorm title tags

For SEO purposes, title tags clearly cannot be neglected.

Among a number of factors, search engines work to gauge how dedicated your website and your web pages are to search terms. Your title tag (along with related content of course) is a highly weight variable in your keyword relevance.

A few tips on choosing the best title tags:

 
1. Use relevant keywords

2. Brainstorm the word or phrase someone would use to search for your page. This may be very different than how you would search, and it may be useful to ask some friends how they would search for your topic.

3. The first words in the title tag command more weight than latter words.

4. Unless you have a famous brand name (i.e. amazon, johnson & johnson), place your company name at the end of the title tag

5. Keep title tag under 10 words

6. For dynamic pages that draw from a database, make sure to put a dynamic tag in the title. For instance, DBI Staffing is a staffing agency in New York City. Their website has a database that handles the list of jobs they are offering. Initially, I gave the job description page a static title, but what happened is that Google indexed all their job postings with the same title. I change the title tag so that it included a PHP tag for the name of the position and the city. This drastically improved relevancy and traffic. Visit their job listing page, click on any of the positions, and check out the title to see what I mean.

For a post I wrote on a PHP script for forms, I used the title “How To Make a Validated PHP Email Form“. A solid number of people search for the information this way, and I have received positive organic google traffic from the identical search term.

The URL you choose for your website will significantly affect your Google rankings.

Think about phrases people would search to find your service. If you are a florist in Boston, people might search “boston florist” and you want to be the owner of the url bostonflorist.com. If you have a drivers education company in Stamford, Connecticut, a popular search will be drivers ed in stamford, ct, so register DriversEdStamford.com. If you need help brianstorming keywords, use the keyword suggestion tool from wordtracker.

The results of keyword driven URLs are clear, here are some prime examples:

Broadway

Music

New York City law

Basketball

In all these instances (and these are just a small few) at least 8 out of the top 10 results have one of the keywords in their URL.

Of course your content has to support the keywords in your URL, and you need links to your site if you want to surface to the top of search terms.

A reasonable question you may have is why does Google care about website URLs?

Simply put, Google wants to know how commited you are to the keywords from your site. That’s why they look at HTML headers and title tags of pages. Your URL is the ultimate commitment your site can make to certain keywords, and Google gives you credit for it.

I am implementing this concept for a few of my clients, and I will post the results in the upcoming months on my blog. Stay tuned!