This document outlines SEO best practices for website design and development. It provides guidelines for making websites more accessible, optimized for search engines, and easier to maintain. Key areas covered include page structure and content, technical components like URLs, metadata, images and redirects, and usability factors. Following these practices can reduce development time and ongoing SEO efforts while improving how users and search engines interact with the site.

2. Why we need this session?
 This session outlines some guidelines that we should
adopt during design and development phase.
 Suggested practices will reduces the time and efforts
taken to develop SEO friendly websites
 It will also reduce the burdens of resources engaged in
SEO and development or maintenance

3. Accessibility
 Page access - Make sure that the isn't accidentally
blocking important pages
 Block inappropriate pages – Some pages should not be
indexed, for example incomplete pages or confidential
pages
 404 errors - try to reduce the amount of 404 errors to a
minimum
 Site speed - Faster is better.
 Mobile accessibility - Google recommends a responsive
design.

4. Components of A Website
 CSS
 URL
 Logo
 Header & Footer
 Navigation
 Site Banner
 Session ID
 Links
 Images
 META Data
 Headers (H1, H2)
 Canonicalization
 Redirects (301/302)
 Query Forms

5. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
 Website should use minimum CSS
 Maximum Number of CSS <= 4
 No inline styles
 Cross browser compatibility
 Cross platform compatibility (Win, iOS, Android)
 W3C Validated CSS

6. URL

7. URL Continued.
 Depth – Number of subfolders (less than four)
 Width – Number of characters (no problem)
 Subdomains 0r Subfolders?
 Subfolders are better as subdomains are considered a
different website by Google
 Page Names – Descriptive (keyword rich)
 No underscores (use hyphen [-] instead)
 If dynamic URLs are mandatory, keep number of
variables used in query string to less than four
 Use extension less URLs (wherever possible)

8. Logo
 Clear placement
 No H1 on logo
 Logo file name should be descriptive
 Logo should have accurate ALT text
 Uniform logo across platforms (web, social, offline)

9. Header and Footer
 Designed with user’s preferences in mind.
 Put links like “About Us”, “Contact Us” here rather
than using in main navigation.
 Place Social Icons in both Header and Footer
 Put Significant Page URLs in Footer
 Use Copyright, Privacy, Terms etc. in Footer

10. Navigation
 Convenient for visitors.
 Crucial information on home page.
 Important information and navigation controls visible
without scroll
 Every page should be reachable from at least one static
text link
 Link depth should not be more than three.
 Avoid Script based navigation

11. Banner
 Lightweight
 Images should have proper description
 All slides should link to relevant page
 Dynamic banners (if possible), so that we can change
it frequently without much efforts

12. Session Id
 Should not appear in URL (causes duplicate content)
 Session IDs are best kept in cookies rather than URLs
 Session IDs can prevent link value from being passed
to page if included in URL

13. Links
 Proper inter-linking
 Descriptive and Relevant Anchor Text
 All links covered in HTML/XML Sitemap
 Refer to all practices for SEO Friendly URLs

14. Images
 Good to include high quality images on website
 Images should be optimized
 Should have relevant ALT & Title attribute
 Include Height and width attribute
 Low image size (30 to 120kb, resolution 72dpi)
 Use Image compression or CSS Sprite for optimization
 Choose a descriptive image file name
 Put all your images in a folder called ‘images’

15. META Data
 Title (up to 60 characters)
 Description (up to 150 characters)
Keywords – No ranking benefits (but suggested use)
 Most important factor for SERPs
 Make sure to develop a mechanism to add META
details on all web pages of the site.
 Inclusion of Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and
Google+ publisher attributes
 Use Schema Attributes

16. Headers (H1, H2)
 Very important for ranking
 Only one H1 per page (use primary keyword)
 H2 as per page content
 No H1 on Logo

17. Canonicalization
 Important aspect from SEO point of view.
 Google assumes abc.com, www.abc.com and
http://abc.com as different URLs
 Use “rel=canonical” wherever required

18. Redirects (301/302)
 URL redirects impact the performance of websites.
 All permanent redirection should be 301
 302 should be used for temporary redirection
 In case of redesign, preserve URLs

19. Some Do’s and Don’s
 Do’s
 Have valid HTML
 Use 301 redirects for moved pages
 Use custom 404 errors for missing pages
 Keep CSS in external include files
 Block indexing of tags/ categories in blogs
 Don’ts
 Require cookies to serve important content
 Allow broken links
 Use images, Flash, or JavaScript to display important text
 Make content only accessible through forms or other elements that
require human action