How To Do Google SEO Yourself Part 7
Its an undeniable fact that everyone loves a good looking theme and layout on a site, but you need to make sure whether your theme is not only liked by your visitors but also search engines. Before choosing or designing a layout, just make sure whether your layout satisfies the condition of being search engine friendly.
1. Make sure your layout loads faster, this is the very basic thing you need to focus up on while designing or choosing a template, irrespective of what server you may choose to host your website, you need to know there are people who run multiple websites on multiple tabs mostly these days, that means though your server may load faster, but still when the users spend very little bandwidth of their internet connection to open your website, they should still be able to access your pages real quick. Also keep mobile users in mind.
2. Do not over use images in your layout, layouts which uses huge number of images often load very slow.
3. Say good bye to flash, people think I am an enemy to flash designs, but its not true, I love flash layouts and flashy stuffs, but unfortunately search engines cannot read flash very effectively and also flash designs tend to take more time to load, which may sometimes annoy your visitors.
4. Using CSS to your layout design is a good practice, but make sure you are not using multiple CSS files for your design, though it may not affect your site speed in a big way, but still it does have its influence to a certain degree.
5. Do not over use javascript in your layout, some people do tend to get over excited with using javascript but do not over use javascripts where you can effectively replace it with CSS.
6. Another important aspect of designing a template is its codes, there are lots of decent looking templates out there, but when you look at their codes, they are normally little messy, messy codes consumes more bandwidth, server load and takes little more time to load, also search engines have a hard time in sorting things out with a messy source codes in your layout.
7. Make sure your layout design or template exposes the actual content in its source, because I have recently had a person mailing me with his blog claiming that he adds new contents every day to his blog, also he made a decent amount of backlinks to his blog but still he don’t find Google indexing his contents. When I went through his blog, I found that the theme he is using for his blog doesn’t actually exposes any of the site’s content when I looked in to the source, so be sure to check it when you design a layout. This thing often happens when you over use javascript and flash in your layout.
8. Check whether all the browsers can read your pages without any problem, I often find websites that loads really good on firefox, but fail to load on IE. So make sure your layouts are browser friendly as well, as there are good number of people who use all the major browsers available.
Category: SEO Tips
