Though many businesses are anxious to hire a professional to handle their search engine optimization there are a number of simple website design changes that you can do without professional help. Though keep in mind any good professional is going to recommend you make these changes anyway, so if you start now, by the time you do hire your SEO specialist you'll be that much farther ahead of the game!

There are a number of important considerations you should keep in mind not only when promoting your website but when you begin to design it as well. Many of the more elemental of the design specifications should be common practice for professional web designers but if your site is not up to the following standards we suggest you get a web design professional to help re-engineer your infrastructure as soon as possible.

Think Like a Robot?
When designing a website, from an SEO perspective, remeber that the search engine robot crawl your site for relevant information. Now of course the computer script that is actually evaluating your web pages is not a robot in the classic theatrical sense, but it is called a robot because it behaves very much in the way we have learned robots do from TV and film.

Basically it is a simple, autonomous being that makes observations and performs repetitive tasks with precision. When we say simple we are referring to the robots inability to make complex conclusions about what it sees. A robot can categorize those things laid out simply for it (EG, red_circle.gif, yellow_square.jpg or orange_triangle.tif) but it cannot make logical conclusions that a human observer might make such as planet_earth.jpg could also be interpreted as blue/green ball. As such when naming, titling and creating the descriptions of your HTML pages it is important to keep the simplicity of the robot in mind. ??

The same holds true for images and links where you can use the ALT tag to clearly specify those important details which you want the search engine to be able to find later on. HTML page titles such as con_frm_pg.html, while perhaps appearing more streamlined, provides no information in and of itself to a robot while contact_form_page.html is straight forward.

Now many of you designers are thinking, "Hey, that's what the page description and title are for!" but it cannot and does not hurt to cover all your bases when dealing with robots. For example tool_catalog.html with the description "Find our best value tools in our catalog" and titled "Best Value Tool Catalog" is one more reference than saying simply tcat.html. ??

A small difference perhaps but then again one could also say there is only a slight difference between being on the first page of search results and the second as well? Now of course the robot scripts used by Google and the other major search engines are more complex and robust than the example mentioned here, but what's important to remember is that they are all basically doing the same straight-forward job: collecting information. While many things about your website may seem blindingly obvious to you it is extremely important to keep the blunt, unthinking logic of the robot in mind in all aspects of your web design. ??

When labeling pictures, naming links, entering descriptions and so on make sure you are providing for the robot all the necessary information it will need to properly crawl and classify your site. This means keeping all considerations in mind, for example, when considering SEO UK companies need to make sure that they not only use terms to indicate "England", but "United Kingdom", "Britain" and "UK" as well. While it's an easy intuitive leap for you and I to make, it's not something the robot will discern immediately. While you can rely on the search engine algorithms to sort such distinctions out later, can you ever really be sure? Best to cover your bases, and cover them early on in your site design! ?

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Article Submitted By: Kathryn Dawson
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