Website design and development is a thriving service industry at present. With passage of time, web business owners have realised the importance of their websites and are making constant efforts in bettering them. They have to undertake the dual task of making them appealing enough for users as well as search engines.

First and foremost, you need to keep in mind the target audience of your online business. Understand the needs of your business and the solutions to all sorts of user problems that might arise in due course. Once you are clear about the objective of the site, you can go about creating a dummy structure that suits primary requirements.

The homepage of a site is its identity for the outside world. As a designer, you need to put maximum efforts in coming up with a splendid homepage that'll be able to retain the attention of the visitor so much so that he feels the urge to scan the other pages of your site. The page should have relevant and informative content so that a visitor is not put off by lack of information on the first page he views.

Your web pages must be dynamic, and this dynamism comes from frequent alterations in its content matter. Even if you do not have anything new to tell your prospective buyers, share news or other industry information that can be useful for them. This will not only alter your content, giving out the right signals to search engines, but will also tell visitors that you care for their needs.

As a designer, you need to adhere to search engine guidelines in order to make a mark in the domain of search engine marketing. Incorporate main keywords in your content so that the search engine spider has good reason to index and rank your pages. Optimise meta tags like title, description, keywords and Alt Tags for easy crawling.

However, do not resort to negative techniques like doorway pages, redirects or keyword stuffing. Do not hide keywords in the form of text that is invisible to the viewer but can be easily crawled by search engine spiders. By doing so, you stand the risk of being supplemented, blacklisted or even banned.

There might be certain pages on your website that you do not wish to be crawled. Place such pages in a robots.txt file - this protocol specifies to search engines that the contents of this file are not meant to be indexed. When you use stylesheets or JavaScripts codes in web designing, put them into separate .css and .js files respectively and link them to other web pages. This will facilitate faster crawling and indexing of your site.

In terms of hardcore designing, it is advisable to avoid the excessive use of graphics, frames, flash and other forms of media. They make your pages heavy, and increase their download time. Here, it is advisable to remember that in the online world, visitors do not stay on a page for more than five seconds on an average.

About the Author:
Lalita Negi works for the domain of Internet Advertising and Marketing. She is an expert in services like web designing, web content development etc, and is presently associated with ePurple Media, Website marketing company based in the UK.