Google, Yahoo, MSN, consumers, and shareholders all appreciate user-friendly and well designed sites. This strong feature keeps them coming back and optimizes your search engine results. A well-designed site perfectly executes these 6 tips.

Design For Your User

As stated above, your site must be user-friendly to those who are using it, your users. The colors must blend and be easy on the eyes. The font needs to be large enough, but not to large to draw attention away or distract the eye. It must be easy to navigate and all the pages must have another page to link to. Try to stay away from pull-down menus, clashing colors, excessive advertisements and small font.

Here are some of the best sites found on the web, use them as reference: Amazon.com, Gorp.com, Kids.gov, Guggenheim.com, and google.com

A Fast Working Site

Neither user nor spider wants to sit around and wait for your site to load. Avoid an overload of graphics. If you are using Flash, create a Flash-free alternative. This way if people don't want to wait they can ‘skip intro' or Flash.

Easily Comprehendible

The content on your site needs to be perfect; avoid big words, non-familiar terms and long run-on sentences. Very few people have time to read paragraph after paragraph; bullets are fast and lead the reader to information they want. Check and recheck your spelling. Show your intelligence through content and grammar.

Validate Your HTML

Spider will ignore HTMLs with long titles, numbers or symbols. Keep it simple and validate your HTMLs at http://validator.w3.org/

Use ALT tags for images

Alt attributes or alt tags are what describe your images to spiders and users using hand held devices, or text only browser. An alt attribute arranges your site back to the basics, almost to the format when the Internet was first being developed.

Perfectly Functional

Everything from graphics, links, registration forms, key locks, and cookies needs to be perfectly functional. If not viewers will be quick to click out of your site.

These 6 guidelines are simple, but must not be ignored. They will guide you to high search engine rank and keep your viewers happily returning.