This is the third article in our website building series designed to showcase ethical, safe, seo web design methods.
The first article discussed how to qualify your niche and the second discussed seo planning.

Before we build our website we should discuss some important factors that all websites built with professional website design methods should include.

Quality Hosting

Website hosting is cheap. There are some really good reasons to stay away from free hosting that I don't plan to cover here. The bottom line is your shared web host should provide these minimum features at a cost between $5 - $10 per month:

• Unlimited subdomains
• Unlimited databases
• Unlimited email accounts
• Perl, PHP, Ruby, ASP, Python (your scripting language of choice)
• Webalizer, AWStats (or your favorite log analyzer)
• Access to raw log files
• SSL
• cPanel, Plesk
• Hundreds of Gigabytes of disk space
• Thousands of Gigabytes of bandwidth
• Simple install of forums / blogs (fantastico or similar)
• FTP & ssh for Unix/Linux hosting
• Excellent uptime & support

Dedicated ip addresses are not necessary. There are plenty of good hosting options out there. If you are not sure where to go try Digital Point, Sitepoint, or Webmasterworld forums and search for best web hosting to get varied opinions. Take a look at the quality of the poster's website when considering someones “advice” on hosting.

Visitor Experience

Interactivity
Don't build pages just to build pages. All pages should have a purpose. You must engage your reader to minimize your site bounce rate. Try to engage the visitor to either convert (sell something) or interest them in related content with every page.

The new rage is visitor interaction with blogs, forums, social media, polling, and just anything where your visitor feels empowered to make a difference rather than simply passively scanning text.

Readability
Your content should be large enough for easy scanning. People don't want to constantly adjust their browsers because of tiny fonts. I think a minimum font size of 11 point is acceptable with 12 point if your audience is an older crowd.

High contrast is important for readability as well. Make sure that the foreground and background works with anchor text when creating links too. Many websites use backgrounds that work with the content but the link text is hard to read. White background and black text converts best for us.

Minimize the use of bolding and linking in content. It is distracting and confusing to include dozens of links and bolded words in minimal content. Bolding and linking should be designed with a purpose. Content should be separated in readable paragraphs. Whitespace improves scan ability and readability.

Always include headings to identify and qualify the content included in your web pages.

Page Loading Time

Internet connection speeds continue to vary from slow to lightening fast. Page loading time for dial up connections can be dismally slow while broadband connections load quickly. For this reason, page weight should be minimized, preferably to 40K or less when possible.

Graphics included on a page load much slower than the same kb of text. 70% compression of text is possible while image files don't get much compression boost at all.

Useful & Simple

The most important feature your website can employ is simplicity and usefulness. Make a visitor think or confuse them and the back button is typically the result. This is one of the reasons that most successful website employ typical, consistent interfaces that people are already familiar with if they have browsed the web at all.

Why do people visit websites? They are looking for information, a product, a service, or for social enjoyment. How many people have told you they just have to come back to a website because it has such a cool unique design...

Linkable Content

The goal of your content is to convert visitors. In order to obtain traffic, and get visitors, you need among other things, inbound links. Webmasters link to unique, interesting content that is related and possibly useful to their visitors.

This means that rehashing the same content that can be found everywhere else makes you less linkable. This means that any link you get will be manufactured because nobody will link to dull, duplicate, or rehashed content.

Developing content is an art form. Think like a visitor would. What are you interested in knowing about the niche your website services. Make this content easy to find, easy to read, and informative.

Internally link related content on your site. Contextual links from one page to another on your site using relevant anchor text is critical to topical relevance, indexing, and flowing link juice from one page to another.

Domains Are Not Ranked Pages Are

Each page on your website is pretty much on its own where ranking is involved. Pages are ranked not domains. Domain trust and authority are part of the equation but not under your control. Domain trust and authority are built by creating independent, relevant, rank able pages throughout your site. One follows the other.

This is why deep links are important for your domain. If you identified your niche and your target keywords as we discussed earlier then you will already know how many keyword focused landing pages you intend to build to service your niche. Each of these pages need links using relevant anchor text, not just your domain home page.

SEO Web Design
The next article in our series is all about actually creating pages that will get indexed, rank, and convert traffic.

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