Well-Positioned Keywords Rank High

Aside from attracting and retaining visitors, your site's design is critical for search engine positioning. Many search engines and directories, such as Yahoo!, will manually review your site before accepting it. The editors look for sites with good design to add to their indices. If your site is clean, easy to navigate, fast and pleasant, visitors will stay longer and your site will score higher.

Another design tip is to make sure your target keywords appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. The page title is most important. Failure to put target keywords in the page title is the main reason why perfectly relevant web pages may be poorly ranked.

Search engines also like pages where keywords appear "high" on the page. To accommodate them, use your target keywords for your page headline, if possible. Have them also appear in the first paragraphs of your web page.

Keep in mind that tables can "push" your text further down the page, making keywords less relevant because they appear lower on the page. This is because tables break apart when search engines read them.

Large sections of JavaScript can also have the same effect as tables. The search engine reads this information first, which causes the normal HTML text to appear lower on the page. Place your script further down on the page, if possible. As with tables, the use of meta tags can also help.

The Golden Rule of site design is to let your visitors do it! Monitor your traffic reports to learn what pages receive the most visitors.

Source: "Design" by Yelena Shapiro with Etelka Lehoczky