There are the 3 “F”s which I’ll always try to avoid during web development.

No Flash

That’s right. I’ll avoid embedding flash (movie) in my web pages. The top reason for this is that when there is flash in a web page, it’ll take a long time for the page to load. If the visitors see nothing on your web page or are simply impatient to wait for page to load fully, they will just click “Back” and you’ll lose one valuable click.

No Fanciful Graphics

Similar to that of flash, I’ll make sure the size of the graphics and icons on my web page are less than 100KB (under 20KB for icons).

Frankly, it’s the texts that are important. It’s your salescopy that help you to sell, not graphics – technically.

The 3 best graphic formats to use on web pages are JPEG, GIF and PNG. Other than these 3 graphic formats, the rest such as BMP, TIFF etc. are a no-no for webpages.

By maintaining small sized graphics, web page will load fast. Ideally, a web page should be fully loaded within 15 seconds.

No Frame

I’ll always avoid using frame in my web page design. This is more for SEO consideration.

Take for example, my internet (fax) business website www.ezfax.com.sg. It is using frame. If you click on the tabs such as FAQ or Contact Us, you’ll noticed that the URL as displayed in the browser stays at www.ezfax.com.sg. It looks like there’s only 1 page.

In SEO terms, it’s better to have lots of web pages per website/domain so that each HTML page has a good chance to get good ranking on its own keyword.

Another reason to avoid frame is to eliminate navigation issue. At times, a new page might load from within the frame. Of course, these can be resolved by correcting the HTML codes but this might prove too technical for the less savvy.

When WordPress blogs are first set up, the permalinks are always ending with /?p=XX ie. http://designingweb.org/?p=1 etc.

Imagine you’ve blogged till your 100th post, what will be the permalink of the 100th post? You guessed it, it’ll end with /?p=100.

All the default permalinks will look almost identical except for the post number. That is not benefiting in terms of searh engine optimization.

To make the permalinks search engine friendly, it is best to include the title of the post as part of the permalink … move your mouse to the permalinks in this blog and you’ll see the difference!

Do a search in Google on the keyword “webmastering tips” now and you’ll see that the number 1 ranking is this blog and number 2 ranking is my first post (below). These are phenomenal results in SEO terms.

P.S. To edit your permalink structure, log in to your WordPress admin, Settings, Permalinks, and set /%post_id%/%postname%/ as the Custom Structure. Click Save Changes and your permalinks are optimized for the search engine.

The first and most important step for SEO (search engine optimization) is Keyword Analysis.

Keyword Analysis is akin to business feasibility study. Before you buy any domain to start any website, the first thing you must do is to determine how many possible searches are there for the respective keywords; this gives you the idea on the potential amount of clicks that could reach your website via search engines.

The best keyword analysis tool is none other than https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Why is it the best? Because it’s from Google itself and it’s FREE! Frankly, there is no need to invest in any other high-dollar keyword analysis tool.

With this Google keyword tool, you can also know the CPC (cost per click) of a keyword. If you’re trying to earn from Google AdSense, you’d want to choose a keyword with high CPC. In contrast, if you are the (AdWords) advertiser, this is the possible amount of CPC that you need to bid to appear as Sponsored Links in Google first page for the particular keyword.

If you’re not using this keyword tool yet, try it. You’ll love it for sure.