Does anyone have any tips or examples they want to share of ideal page design optimized for SEO? I'm thinking of actual HTML structure as well as functionality like blogs etc.

The ideal page design for seo would be a page of text with little code and no images. Of course that won't be the most useful desgin for site visitors.

There's isn't necessarrily one design you want to use for seo. There are a lot of factors in rankiing high in a search engine. A lot more than just the design of your site.

I think the best approach is to build a site with content that people will find useful. Develop the site with a minimum of code, by which I mean use only what code is necessary to achieve the look you're after. Use standards as often as possible and do your best to make sure all the code validates.

Originally Posted by mrfettucini

Does anyone have any tips or examples they want to share of ideal page design optimized for SEO? I'm thinking of actual HTML structure as well as functionality like blogs etc.

When its the best for your users to surf.

seperate your css with a .css file, the less the unecessary code the more bots can digest your content.

I think the web must be changed sometimes.

Originally Posted by Basoone

seperate your css with a .css file, the less the unecessary code the more bots can digest your content.

I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes to a bot. It doesn't appear that bots have any trouble at all 'digesting' pages that don't use a .css file.

Is this something you've found from experience Basoone?

Originally Posted by gringo

I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes to a bot. It doesn't appear that bots have any trouble at all 'digesting' pages that don't use a .css file.

Is this something you've found from experience Basoone?

This helps in getting the content to the bots on the top of the page and apart from SEO there are other benefits of easy maintenance.

Bots also read filenames of images, folders and html pages. Alt tag in images and I'm not sure if title tags in links help, but it won't hurt. Have your keywords used throughout the content of your webpage. inventory.overture.com is a good place to research what keywords where hit last month on yahoo.

Although one could argue the ideal page is "perfect for visitors and the search engines will follow"... this isn't always bang on in practice. Less complex search engines (Ahem, MSN) will take notice of prominent keywords, bold text, H1 tags, alt image tags, titles, descriptions, keyword density etc.

Whilst Google will take these into account, Google's much less easy to, well, trick.

Bare bones is best for SEO (but not the eye).

Use CSS and call it like:
<link rel=stylesheet href=MyCss.css type=text/css>
and do the same if you use javascript:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
to cut down on code. Also avoid tables if possible, which I don't do.

Google also says that a proper hierarchy helps greatly.

So you have

<h1> Heading </h2>

<p> Text content and whatnot </p>

<h2> Heading 2 </h2>

<p> Blah Blah Blah </p>

<h3> Heading 3 </h3>

<p> Blah Blah Blah Blah </p>