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Los Angeles SEO: Once content of a website has been optimized using SEO guidelines, there are few guidelines that should be followed with respect to website design. Combining both of these techniques in the process of releasing your product gives your site a much better shot at being ranked higher by a search engine. These site optimizations can be spread across metrics like site accessibility, URLs, meta-tags, site architecture and many others.

A site is easily accessible if the content on the site is delivered to the recipient correctly and consistently. For a site to be accessible it should have no or as few bad links as possible. Small file sizes are a very favorable attribute as spiders that crawl the site will not cache pages that exceed a 150 KB limit. This directly affects user as well as they will need less time to load your pages. Whatever content that we require to be crawled should be accessible by hyperlinks and should not be hidden by using forms or a submit button. Spiders do not enter these sections of a website. The HTML elements should conform to the W3C guidelines to the maximum extent. And crucially, investing in reliable servers is imperative as search engines do degrade sites that experience considerable downtimes or are slow in responding. If attention is not given to these components of your website, search engines as well as users will react negatively.

The next category of optimization that can be looked into is that of URL design. Many websites use dynamic URLs to supply the server data in order to retrieve relevant documents. If the number of dynamic parameters exceeds two, the length and complexity of the URL increases. With this, user readability as well as search engine comprehension will diminish. Wherever possible use human readable links. Meta-tags have been slowly ignored in assessing PageRank. There is however still a good use for a well designed meta-tag. Search results usually include a small snippet of your site content. This content is what your meta-tag holds. If meta-tags are efficiently written, it could considerably improve user response. Just as important is the title tag. It appears as the blue hyperlink for each result and due to its highlighted nature, attractive titles tend to get higher number of click throughs. A well designed meta-tag will have the relevant keyword, be concise and brand your product. Avoid using content text inside JavaScript, images or forms. Search engines do not look inside these areas when crawling through your site.

Another very useful component is a sitemap. By providing a link on every page on a site to a sitemap it gives a better layout of the entire site to a spider. If sites are very large, the sitemap should show categorization of the pages. Creating a site with pages not being any deeper than 3 links away from the homepage is an ideal structure. It will ensure spiders crawl almost all pages on your site. If your site happens to be much larger, use categories and make sure no categories are more than 3 clicks from the home page. Your sitemap should in-turn reflect the linking structure of your categorized site.

Here’s a list to help you sum up the practices mentioned.

• Make your site accessible
  • Use good servers
  • HTML should conform with W3C standards
  • File sizes do not exceed 150KB
  • Minimize or eliminate broken links
  • URL Design
    • Use human readable URLs as often as possible
    • Limit dynamic parameters to two
    • Meta-tags should be well designed
    • Avoid using content text in JavaScript, images or forms etc.
    • Sitemap
      • Link all pages to a sitemap
      • Categorize your website
      • Avoid pages deeper than 3 clicks from homepage

Making little cheat sheets with these guidelines and keeping them close to where you work could help in reinforcing these practices in your daily routines. Many sites offer you many kinds of advice. Choose the most applicable ones to you, and follow them religiously. In time you probably will be able to make your own list from your own experience. SEO after all is an art not an exact science. Search engines will keep us guessing, and we will keep trying to get our guesses right.