A Quick Guide To Building Effective Websites
By seosimplify
Here are several key components you should consider when building an effective website. Mastering these elements will make your website more visually appealing, user-friendly, and encourage repeat traffic.
Layout
Having a clean and neat layout is important for your visitors to be able to move around the site efficiently. Remember, they are usually there for specific information. Make it easy for them to find that information. If you are having trouble keeping your navigation clean I recommend using a template. My friends over at FreeWebTemplates can help you out greatly.
Navigation
When a user visits a website for the first time they are usually looking for specific information and they want to be able to find that information easily. Your navigation should be descriptive and logical. Your main links should either be at the top of the page or across the left side. This is where most people will look. I recommend that your navigational links be underlined and a different color than the rest of the text. This allows visitors to easily distinguish between normal content and links. I recommend having a sitemap available not only for the visitors but for search engine robots also.
Content
I’m sure everyone has heard the phrase “content is king” and well, it’s true for the most part. An effective website needs unique and valuable content. This not only helps your search engine ranking, it helps your visitors find what they are looking for and encourages them to come back again. Content needs to contain keywords that pertain to you website. Do not overstuff your keywords. There should be between 3-7 keywords per 150 words.
Links
Links serve a very valuable and important function for websites. Links tell the visitors where they need to go to find their information. Links should contain key phrases. Once again, if you have a gardening website a good link might be “How to Grow Roses” or “Growing Roses In Poor Soil”. It is a good idea to take some of your key phrases in your content and make them links to other parts of you website.
Load time
An effective website has a reasonable load time. It definitely should take no more than 10 seconds for your website to load, especially on broadband. There are a few ways to decrease long load times. Cutting back on heavy graphics is one of the biggest issues. Externalize JavaScript and CSS files. Some websites have lots and lots of JavaScript and CSS coding and this takes the web page longer to load. By externalizing the scripts it allows for quicker load time. This also allows for search engine bots to search your site for inclusion. I recommend the Web Page Analyzer to test your sites load time. It also gives you recommendations on how to decrease load time.
Screen resolutions & Browser compatibility
It is vital to design your websites that work on multiple browsers and screen resolutions. My personal philosophy is that it should fit comfortably in a 800×600 resolution, however, most people nowadays use at least 1024×768 but there is no reason to design a website that is 1024 pixels wide.
Also, your website should look the same when using different browsers. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Safari all read websites a little different. There are some Firefox add-ons where you can test your browser in IE.
Comments
About the link titles... I'll post an article on here soon and on my blog on that specific topic. That way I can go into more detail.
The 10 second rule I gathered from various online sources. Including a book entitled 'Website Optimization' written by Andrew B King that has been published by O'Reily.
The main reason for the 10 second rule is that 80% of users won't wait longer than that for a page to load. Therefore I mentioned that from a users perspective. Though I agree with you that 10 seconds does seem a bit long and one should always try keep loading times down to an absolute minimum. I would recommend between 1 - 2.5 seconds from an SEO perspective.
Google also hasn't publicized any recommendations when it comes to loading times. Therefore, if your website loads at even 0.8 seconds faster than your fastest competitor, then you will have the advantage, no matter what your website loading times are.
Therefore, as an SEO, I do research on all of my clients competitors website loading times then do website optimization until I can beat (or at the very least match) the fastest competitors loading times.
I hope that this helps to clarify a few things. And I will post a topic on here soon that will go into detail about the links subject.
5institutes 22 months ago
Can you give some tips on "Links" and what keywords should be used in them? I am assuming you mean "display URLs" or "anchor text," and in your example you gave a couple on gardening - how would you evaluate what is a good anchor text to use?
That would be helpful information.
Also, on Load Time, you mention it should take no longer than 10 seconds to load...just out of curiosity, where did you come up with that figure?
Who determines that is good for SEO purposes, and where can you document that information as being sound?
Not trying to be ornery, just trying to clarify for your readers. I don't personally think a 10 second load time would be deemed "fast" or beneficial for SEO in Google's eyes (though I could be wrong: it just sounds awfully long and slow!).
Many people with broadband or even DSL would look at that load time as cumbersome, and Google has mentioned that load speed is an SEO signal they measure to determine your ranking.
This according to Google Webmaster tools.