Search Engine Optimization is important for any designer as you would want your site or blog to be easily found by your audience. Check out these optimization tips that will help you design a website that is search-engine friendly.

Provide Easy Accessibility: Build your web pages so that they are quick to load – Google, like your audience, gives preference to websites that load quickly. Not only will your visitors stay longer, but the search spiders will index your pages more easily too.

Remember the Keywords: Your title tag and headlines should contain the keywords and they should show up right in the front – Google picks up only a few characters.

Make your URLs easy to read and insert the keywords in all the tags and content too. But keep in mind that you are writing for your audience and the content should make sense while maintaining the right keyword density.

Develop Content for the Spiders: You can do this by switching the graphics with text for page titles, navigation and similar elements. Flash, media-rich files and other dynamic content can give Google and other search-engines a hard time while indexing your pages.

Also, spiders tend to skip any text that is produced with javascript. So while making your text visible by default, hide it with javascript when your webpage loads.

Internal Linking – Make it Smart: Make your internal linking structure click by using good descriptions along with the right keywords. Keep the navigation simple and user-friendly – so people will go where they want to go.

Provide Sitemap and Archives: Include a sitemap and locate its XML file in the root of your site as this is where the search-engine spiders will look for the map. You can also create a HTML version of the sitemap for your visitors. If you have a blog, maintain archives.

Track 404 Errors: All the links that come from your website – both internal and external should not reveal 404 errors as this is a big put off for your visitors. Use Google webmaster tools to keep track of 404 errors and create a redirection plan for such pages.

Don’t Use These: Spyware, shadow domains, scumware and doorway pages to trick the spiders into indexing your site – these will not help your website gain rankings. In fact, you could get banned from the search engines, especially Google.