Web Design and SEO

Web Design and SEO

By Doug Williams - February 2006

Website design greatly affects how it is received or indexed by the search engines. Search engines index a site based on the body text or content that is used. The purpose of search engine optimization is to bring targeted traffic to your website. A website that is designed to be search engine friendly will bring in many interested visitors.

On-Page and Off Page Factors

Search engines will rank a website based on two major factors. These are on-page and off-page factors. On page factors include those things that exist within the website. This includes keywords, website structure, website content, navigation, etc. Off page factors include those things that exist outside of the website itself. Off page factors include links from other websites, age of a website, how many years a domain name is renewed for, etc.

Visible text is the actual content or body text used within a web page and is how search engines index and classify sites to relevant search results. Remember that no matter how search engine rules change, the one thing that will never change is that content is the king and is the web's reason for being. Search engines do not search based on images or graphics, only on text used in the website.

It used to be that the META Tags were very important, but today the META Tags have very little importance. META Tags are Information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine spiders.

Keywords

Keywords are the foundation for bringing targeted traffic to a website. The first step in designing a website should be selecting words and phrases that someone looking for your product or services would use. Keyword phrases must have good traffic and not too much competition to be effective. Use these keywords in the body text, page names, image names and hyperlinks. Separate the words in the page names with dashes, not with underscores.

The index page or home page is the single most important page. Search engines give this page the greatest importance. Be sure to use plenty of text; home pages with 400-600 words of text will do best with the search engines. Some sites will use graphical “splash” page or graphical introduction pages. If these pages do not have text, the rankings on these types of websites will be greatly reduces.

Navigation

A good navigation system not only allows visitors to move around the website from page to page, but also the search engine spiders. Navigation using Javascript, Flash or image maps can work well for most visitors, but these are difficult for the search engines to follow. Standard HTML hyperlinks are the easiest way for the spiders to navigate your website. Bottom side navigation with a series of HTML hyperlinks works very effectively for the search engine crawlers.

Flash

Flash animations have become very popular today. They produce some cool looking websites. Many entire websites are built entirely with Flash. Most search engines today see Flash animations as a series of images and graphics. The search engines today are for the most part, blind to text used in Flash. Without visible text, the search engines have no idea what a website is about. If using Flash, embed it in an HTML page and use visible text filled with good content and keyword phrases.

Frames

Search engines do not index framed sites very well. Frames do not cause the engines to give you lower rankings, but many times the search engines will not locate content to spider. Our recommendation is to flatten a site and remove the frames. Your best bet when working with frames is to use the "< noframes >" tag, because you're making SURE that the engines have something to index when they get to your site.

Pre-Designed Website Templates

Website templates are semi-finished, pre-designed web pages that can be used to create websites in less time. Some are excellent to use for SEO and while others such as all Flash templates as an example, are not compatible with SEO.

Website Builders

Online website builders are dynamically created web pages created by sophisticated web applications. These allow people to quickly create websites that are nice looking and that can have some powerful capabilities. Many will incorporate ecommerce or have specialized functions. Websites for realtors will have multiple listing and lead generation services included. The downside to these websites is they are not able to be optimized. Because they are generated by sophisticated software, it is not possible to optimize these sites. Almost always these sites are not able to gain the visibility with the search engines.

Conclusion

The best search rankings can be attained by considering SEO from the earliest stages. Before starting the design, look first at the keywords and carefully select the best ones for your website. Layout the page names and navigation structure that you want in your site. Stay away from using frames, Flash websites or websites generated by online website builders. Seek the advice of a SEO professional and review your plans with them. It is much better to build it right the first time rather than having to fix it later.