In a previous article that I wrote concerning Search Engine Optimization I mentioned some of the more obvious blunders when designing your site for good natural placement.

Now, I would like to cover some of the other not so obvious areas where a web owner can make some improvements.

Additional on page factors that impact SEO that aren’t as obvious are;

• Poor code to text ratio.
• Content too far down in the code.
• Low or excessive keyword ratios.
• Low keyword prominence.
• Excessive use of tables.
• Use of frames.
• URL Structuring for dynamic websites.
• Duplicate Content/Canonical Issues.
• No Site Map
• Excessive Use of Java or other scripting.

What do all these mean?

1. Poor code to text ratio. - The Code to Text Ratio represents the percentage of actual text in a web page. The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page. Not all search engines are using the code to text ratio in their index algorithm, but most of them do. So having a higher code to text ratio than your competitors gives you a good start for on-page optimization.

2. Content too far down in the code. - When designing your website, remember to try to get as much meat or substance to the top of your code just below the tag as you can. Having 300 lines of code (style information, java, etc…) before a search engine spider can extrapolate what you site is about may send them running away thereby harming your chances at good organic rankings.

3. Low or excessive keyword ratios. - Identify what you feel your visitors may type into a search engine to find you. There are many tools available for that and I will discuss them in another article. Once you determine what your most important keywords are (and I am only talking about 10 or 12 keywords or phrases here), then you should check to see what their density is. There are various debates on the exact density one should maintain to achieve optimal ratings, but I think everyone is just guessing at this point. I would find a good keyword density checking tool and check the keyword density of my competition. Use that as your benchmark for density. This tool will alert you if your density is perceived to be too low, or too high. Too low can lead to not being perceived as relevant enough while a very high keyword density can be perceived as being spammy.

4. Low keyword prominence. - Keyword prominence is a rating of how prominent a keyword is in your website and this is calculated by looking at your title, description, meta tags and other various on page factors. It is a general belief that you should use your keywords at or near the beginning of the above mentioned areas and also near the beginning of page text, sentences.

5. Excessive use of tables. - Excessive use of tables while doing your design adds additional coding to your page, dilutes the relevance of your actual content, and generally slows page load time which may not have an impact on the spiders, but sure does irritate human visitors. Lay your pages out using creative css techniques, and make sure to like to the css style sheet instead of having all of the code on page.

6. Use of frames. - Frames are just icky. Also, if you view the page source of a page that uses frames, you will notice there is very little code or text displayed. Good for hiding your copyrighted material (not fool proof though), but very bad for natural rankings and organic seo. In short, don’t use frames.

7. URL structuring for dynamic websites. - If you are looking for an advantage to the millions of other pages on the web that look like this… /index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=4&id=16&Itemid=27 Then make sure you do your homework. It is a good idea, if you are just starting your website, to rewrite dynamic urls using mod re-write and give them meaning.

8. Duplicate content/canonical issues. - Lets say you have a website of yourdomain.com Lets say we can get to your website by the following url scenarios; http://www.yourdomain.com | http://yourdomain.com | http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html | http://yourdomain.com/index.html - Each of these pages or urls are viewed to be separate urls by Google. Matt Cutts discusses this in length over at his blog.

9. No site map. - Lets say you are a spider and you are driving around and enter a town you have never been to before but you want to take in all of the sites. Wouldn’t is be great if someone handed you a detailed road map when you crossed the city line? That’s what a site map is. It is a detailed map of your site that helps spiders crawl around and find the important information sooner. There is also a consortium by the major search engines and it is located at Sitemaps.org that offers sitemap protocol and has support from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

10. Excessive use of Java or other scripting. - I am not saying that using these scripts is bad, I am just saying put the scripting on a separate page of the site and call it into the intended page when needed. an example of that is on the home page of CAD Website Design where we rotate selected portfolio pieces on the home page. If you examine the source code, you can’t even see the portfolio script or code. That is because the code used to drive the rotating script is not relevant text and we have chosen to not include it in the body of the text.

Follow these tips when designing your website. These are all on page items that you can control and will make natural improvements in your search engine rankings.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.