An SE friendly website design, short for search engine friendly website design, is a very crucial component that will ensure your website gets targeted traffic from the search engines. While a good website should be designed with the consumer and target audience in mind, it also has to be very appealing to the search engines. This is because the search engine spiders have a way of locating and ranking websites as per their relation and relevance to the keywords entered by people in the search boxes.
Designing an SE friendly site is quite simple, and some rules are even common sense. First and foremost, you should look at the font, which ought to be simple. While fancy large fonts are pretty and visually appealing, they might not be very pretty to the search engines. Ensure you use normal font, plain color, size 12, Arial, courier, or Times New Roman. Your main focus should be the subject matter and not how to present that subject matter.
Step two involves arranging the text as naturally as possible with the use of paragraphs, bullets, etc to break up the content and put emphasis on the main points. However, you should be easy with the use of exclamation marks, capital letters, etc as they may not be decipherable to the search engines. The word count of a typical webpage should be between 250 and 700 words, so that the search engines can be able to rank you close enough, if not at the top of the search results list.
Flash media and complex graphics should be avoided. This is because in addition to distracting the attention of clients and making pages load slowly, search engine crawlers interpret picture and graphics as blank spaces. Needless to mention, no blank space can give a website any rank, no matter how optimized to the keyword it might be. On the other hand, ensure all pages make use of specific keywords linked to the product or service you’re dealing with so that you can attract targeted traffic. As far as search engines are concerned, text is the king.
A spam design should equally be avoided when creating a SE friendly website design. This shows up on your website in form of hidden text in the HTML code. Rather, ensure your HTML code has Meta Tags and even though they are not as effective to attract the search engines as they were a few years back, they still work. Of equal importance to pay attention to for a SE friendly site is the site layout. Dead links and poor navigation on a site will not only annoy the visitors but will equally confuse the search engines.
It is advisable to have a sitemap and ensure that the hierarchy of the web pages is as they appear physically. For a big website, a Google site map will do, only that you should make sure the site navigation tools and specific and terse. Even though the key elements of se friendly web designs put much emphasis on simplicity, hence appear to be very simple and one-dimensional, ignoring them you will only have yourself to blame. The moment you make your site as friendly to the search engines as possible, you can rest assured that targeted traffic will be coming to your site within no time.

