Webpage design is all about empowering yourself to make your income grow, and by definition this requires your website to be noticed. Since Google is one of the top search engines in the world at this moment, ignoring Google is essentially the same as ignoring your own success. Since you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot, be certain you have the following 5 aspects in your website.
The Keyword
Everybody knows about keywords. It is an extremely rare website designer or blogger who doesn’t at least give a passing nod of consideration to the keywords on his or her slice of the Net. Unfortunately, this is about as far as a lot of people get when it comes to how they will use keywords. Gone are the days when you could have a half dozen or so different keywords on a single page and expect to be successful with each of them. Nowadays, if you want to be successful with any kind of keyword, you want to have a single one picked out for each page. Another classical way to optimize for a keyword when Google was a lot younger was to simply stuff the page with keywords. Sometimes webpage design used to be have so much keyword saturation in a given page that the sentences therein weren’t even readable. Imagine if this sentence contained a particular keyword three times — unless that keyword was a connective article like “a” or “the,” it’s almost laughable. Google finally caught on to that, so just use the keyword once.
Synonymous Relevant Keywords
Nowadays Google understands that sometimes a given keyword has a lot of synonyms that mean essentially the same thing. In the past, Google didn’t understand this, but now you get to write like your target audience has a brain. This may sound like a limiting factor in your webpage design, but it actually opens up a lot of new avenues. Considering that each new synonym you add for the original keyword brings a new dimension of searchers to your website, this can help you tremendously in drawing in good traffic.
Emphasis on Customer Search Patterns
One of the best things Google has ever done is take the emphasis off of what it wants and align itself with how potential customers and other readers actually search the Web. This is something of an intangible trait that a site should have, but ultimately it comes down to being congruent. If your site or blog is about a particular topic, linking through some random anchor text to a completely unrelated topic is not going to get you much. Such outdated, shady tactics get little respect from the sites linked to, Google no longer rewards these incongruent links at all and human beings rarely click on these links. Google will even penalize you for trying this, so don’t do it.
Solid, Integrated Design
There was a time when marking a page with “” or other types of tags would emphasize this, even though it did nothing for the viewer. Now, however, Google wants you to make your page design congruent enough to feature the most important parts in the most obvious and prominent places.
Legitimate Online PR
Links are no longer about building a linking network. Nowadays, they’re about finding and building relationships with others and linking out of mutual respect. These legitimate linking relationships are fairly close to actual public relations and marketing instead of trying to “game” Google. Google is a very smart search engine and is getting smarter all the time. Design for people and Google will reward you.
