I need an SEO friendly web design (advice)

I want to design a site that is SEO friendly, and don’t have money.

If I find a professional looking CSS template is this a good option?

How can you tell if a CSS template is well optimized? is it just if it
doesn’t have loads of code for google to read.
the other option i was thinking of is to get a guide for dreamweaver
that could tell me a SEO friendly design. Does anyone know of any
good books that can help?

Thanks

Covering SEO in this short space is a little tough, but let me at least point you in the correct directions:

  1. You will definitely want to use a CMS based platform like: Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. Many of these are easily installed through your hosting provider’s control panel.
  2. For many of these, you can get many free templates which are quite modifiable…they all allow easy access to META tags and editing of page content - which is where 90% of SEO happens.
  3. The CSS doesn’t make much difference for SEO, your content does, so here is what I’m going to recommend:
    a) Go to GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOLS (login with your gmail account…if you don’t have one, get one).
    b) Type in KEYWORDS that YOU THINK OTHERS ARE TYPING IN TO TRY AND FIND A SITE LIKE YOURS.
    c) The tool will return Keywords that people are actually using…pick the best 1-3 keywords and try to optimize your home page for that.
    d) Optimization is about the RIGHT MIX of keywords on your page…making sure your site “complies” with the TOP 10 sites currently showing up in the Google search for a particular term.

Google looks at over 2000 pieces of information to rank you. There are really good pieces of software out there that can do analysis for you, but if you’re on a budget, it may be a lot of trial an error. Keep in mind that another HUGE portion of SEO is backlinking (How many sites link to your site), the quality of those backlinks, age of your site, how long you’ve bought your domain for (longer the better). There is a lot to measure (make sure you install Google Analytics on your site as well…you can’t see how you’re doing if you aren’t measuring).

Let me know if you run into roadblocks and I can give specific answers where applicable.

[font=verdana][ot]I’ve moved this to the Internet Marketing section, which is where we have discussions about SEO[/ot]

The good news is that an awful lot of SEO costs you nothing except a few minutes when setting up your website!

A professional looking template may be a good thing to go for, in terms of the overall design and promotion of your site, but its impact on SEO will be minimal. Search engines don’t “look” at a page, they just “read” it. It doesn’t matter what the site looks like, what matters is that it’s got good content that is marked up with appropriate semantic code (ie <h*> tags for headings and so on). If the code base is good and you’re able to put in suitable things for the <title> and <meta description> then you’re well on the way.

There are lots of resources and discussions on these forums about SEO, so have a look round this section, especially the sticky threads, and see what we’ve said before.[/font]

hey Ryan, sounds like you got a good grasp on SEO. thanks man, you made my day. Would you mind if i get back to you in future if i have any queries?

That stopped being true more than 10 years ago; today’s seo influence by metatags is minute.

Benbob…You are absolutely correct…that was not a correct statement…thanks for the correction.

Hey,

tips for SEO friendly website :

Keyword Research
Website Load Times
Website Images(create smaller images for the galleries)
it’s important to get the keywords in the right position on the page
Add Social Elements
Friendly URL’s and image file-name
Sitemaps
W3C Validation

Here are four tips for making sure that your website design is SEO-friendly and going to not only look great but have ideal visibility in the SERPs, without compromising quality in either area:

  1. Use the right fonts and heading styles
  2. Use the right navigation system
  3. Use a text call to action, rather than an image
  4. Use the right HTML codes

You have to create site .php or .asp sites. So that it will be better for SEO point of view. Then you have to fix CSS, html, navigation structure errors. Put right title, desc, keywords. Put some relevant images with alt-tag to your site.

You can try wordpress themes and then optimize the content by placing header tags, meta tags and images. There are factors to consider when doing the on-page optimization, first have 3 deep links from homepage, have an organized site architecture, check the loading speed and separate the css and javascript code. You can also search for these factors. Always test your website with the users point of view.