How to Choose an SEO Friendly Website Builder

You're ready to create your first business website and get it online. You choose a site builder and put hours into your website. A month later, it's no where to be found in the search engines. You wait a little longer hoping it just needs a little more time. But another month passes with no change. So you set off on a quest to find out why. Turns out your site is in frames, flash, or filled with javascripts and extraneous coding, and the search engines got overwhelmed when they tried to index it! Oh no! What to do now?

It doesn't have to go that way. Don't let the situation above happen to you! A little research can save you a lot of frustration. Avoid a website disaster by knowing what to look for to find a search engine friendly website builder.

Here are 10 important features to look for in any site builder or content management system:

1. Full control of the template: Are you able to download and edit the templates that power your site? You may not think this feature is important when you're just getting started, but in the future you will likely want to edit the template for search engine optimization or to have a professional designer change your website design.

2. Custom title tag per page: You want to be able to choose the title for each page of your website.

3. Custom description per page: You also want to be able to add a custom description for each page of your website.

4. Custom keywords per page: Each page should have it's own custom keywords/phrases.

5. Ability to directly edit the HTML of your pages: Look for a program that offers both WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing mode and HTML code editing mode. This way you'll be able to edit your code to include heading or strong tags in the appropriate places as you work on optimizing your pages.

6. Custom image names and alt tags: Check to be sure that the program you choose does not rename your images, but allows you to upload them with custom names. Alt tags for the images should either be generated based on the image name and/or allow you to edit them.

7. Keywords in page names: Ideally you'll be able to choose your page name to include the key phrase you're targeting.

8. SEO friendly page structure: Page names should be short and without dynamic characters (such as ? & or =) or with only 1 or 2 dynamic characters.

9. Text linking: Look for a site builder that allows you to choose to use text based navigation menus instead of only graphics or javascripts.

10. Site map: An SEO friendly site builder will include an easy to activate site map that links to every page of your site.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Michelle Shaeffer is the CEO of Creo Communico LLC, a website hosting and design firm exclusively for small and home based businesses. Our mission is to provide affordable website hosting along with resources and support to help our clients succeed, including 300+ video tutorials, a choice of free site builders, and dozens of easy install scripts. Visit www.creocommunico.com today for a selection of free website management guides on domain names, website hosting, e-commerce and more.

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