Design Tips
The following tips are intended to help make most Web sites easier to find (more “search-engine friendly”) and more appealing to most visitors.

• Give each page a short meaningful title using appropriate keywords.
   
• Use appropriate meta-description and meta-keyword tags on each page.
   
• Don’t try any “tricks” to get higher placement in search engines. Learn about what search engines are looking for and work within that framework.
   
• Provide an “alt” description of each image—use keywords as appropriate.
   
• Your main keywords should comprise about 2-5 percent of the page content and are most effective in the title, file name, and near the top of the document.
   
• Write many pages about many topics rather than one page about many topics.
   
• Provide some sort of navigation bar for the site. At the very minimum each page should point back to the home page, but preferably to all major sections and to other related pages in the same section.
   
• You have five seconds to show something that will keep a visitor on your site.
   
• Use height and width attributes of images to ensure fast display of your pages.
   
• Keep file sizes as small as possible. A total page size of less than 40 KB (including items such as images, sounds, banner advertisements) is advisable.
   
• Your “home page” is a table of contents. You want it to load quickly, grab the visitors’ attention, and show them where to go to find what they want. The more you stuff into it beyond this, the less effective it will become.
   
• Only use “cookies” if you have to—they offend many people.
   
• Frame-based sites can look great, but they are largely ignored by search engines and make it hard for people to refer friends to a specific page on your Web site.
   
• Ask yourself: “Why would a person want to bookmark this page or tell a friend about it?” The fewer reasons you can think of, the less repeat visitors or referrals you will receive.