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Ways for Developers to Optimize Site for Search Engines by Ultimate Creators

Web Designers and Web Developers spent a lot of time in designing a site and apart from the design they need to make it search engine friendly.There is a lot of things involved from creating a solid layout and a bug free site.Let me list out the seven ways designers and developers can practise better SEO.

1. Avoid Image Heavy Designs

It's not a secret that heavy designs often leads to longer loading time of the site.Page speed plays an important tole in the ranking factors.If you aren't able to cut back on images, design images so that they can be repeated in CSS. With modern CSS, effects such as gradients and drop shadows can be achieved without using images as required in the past.

2. Don't Design Navigation Links In Images

With the help of the anchor text of a link, Google determines what the page is all about.Navigation does just that, while also adding a medium of organization as well. With tools such as type kit available, the excuse of image based navigation is non-existent anymore.

3. Condense CSS and JS files into one document

:As we all know that page speed is an important factor in the ranking,the quick and easy way is to condense the CSS and Js files into one dcument each.For every document that is listed in the code a new call from the server is required, therefore increasing the load time. By decreasing that to just one call for each file type, you decrease the number of calls, therefore decreasing load time.

4. Keep header tag near top of the code

Header tags clearly give us a picture on the content of the page. This particular part is where SEO place the keyword phrases they are trying to rank for.H1 tages should be used for the title of the content.

5. Use CSS Sprites

At Pubcon South 2011, Aaron Shear, the SEO for Zappos talked about the importance of CSS sprites, a savvy way of combining images using CSS to decrease load time. While the concept of doing it manually can be daunting, Google recommends a great tool called SpriteMe, which I've seen great results with personally.

6. Keep the tag lines away from the top

One of the first things you want Google to see in your code is the keywords related to that page. Often designers put slogans and tag lines in the header of a design. This isn't ideal as the first piece of content Google will see on each page is that slogan or tag line which won't be related to that page. If you aren't able to migrate this to another part of the site, it's best to put it in an image.

7. Stop using text-indent:-9999px

Programmers have often used text-indent:-9999px to trick the engines into thinking there is an actual keyword in an image. If you're forced to use an image instead of text, don't try to fool the worlds largest and most sophisticated search engine. Use an alt tag. They know people do this and the team at Google has spoken out against this multiple times.