Designing An SEO Friendly Website

There is no such thing as a format for a site that will always work well for SEO. The main reason being that the main search engines change their minds fairly often as to what it regards as an important factor to any page.

This is one of the main reasons why the free template driven sites rarely rank highly these days. They were developed with ease of use in mind and as the search engines see more and more of an almost identical format it can look like it's one person / company saturating the market.

Wherever possible, your site should be developed by a skilled website designed/programmer combination where the site will be aesthetically pleasing for your visitors but is hard coded to suit the current search engine thinking. Minor changes should be done over time to keep the sites format relative to the current state of search engine algorithms.

If you need to use a cheap or free template for either a brochure site or even an e-store - don't expect to leap to the top positions of search engine results.

To make an easily maintained site, most companies now offer sites that are partially or completely dynamic - this means that information is kept elsewhere (on a database for example) and as each page is loaded in a web browser, the information is written to the page. This means changes can be made to a central point rather than to the page itself. This allows for easier maintenance.

One downside of this format on many occassions is that you see odd symbols in the URL (page name in the top bar) which can include $, ? and & - these can show pages are dynamic and in some circumstances are given a lesser rank that static pages with the same information. The main reason is that dynamic pages are expected to change so ranking a page in one state is potentially unfair to searchers as they may get to the site and it has very different information on it.

There are ways around this where you don't see the dynamic aspect of the pages. (This site is entirely dynamic for example.)

Meta-information - some companies will tell you meta information doesn't matter these days - it does. It matters in 2 ways - it is used as a check and balance with your pages content to ensure you are discussing within your site what you say it is about - plus in the search engine results, it tends to be the information within these areas that is shown in the results. Better page titles, content and description tags will get more people clicking you in preference to your competition once in the search results.