Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Design for SEO

Designing a site to be SEO-friendly encompasses a wide range of topics that include the general structure of the site and its hierarchy, principles and content ratio of individual pages, and specifics of using HTML tags.

Keyword density means the ratio of keywords that you are trying to target for SEO purposes to the other text on your pages. Getting keyword density right—enough so that your SEO goals are achieved, not so much that the search engines are “offended”—is an important goal of core SEO practice. Search engines do look for keywords, but they take away points for excessive and inappropriate keyword “stuffing.”

Even from the point of view of your site visitors, you want a nice density of keywords in your pages—but you don’t want so many keywords that the content of your pages is diminished from the viewpoint of visitors.

It is certainly true that which keywords you use is more important than how many of them there are. Your main focus should be on finding the right keywords, not counting them.

Site Design Principles

The following are some design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your site to optimize it for search engines.

Text is best

For most sites, the fancy graphics do not matter. If you are looking for search engine placement, it is the words that count. Always use text instead of—or in addition to—images to display important names, content, and links. Where it’s reasonable, add a title attribute to anchor tags to provide the bot with ...