Regardless of the type of website, search engines play an important role in generating and maximizing the incoming web traffic. Unfortunately, many websites rank poorly (or don't rank at all) because they failed to take into account how search engines index a website.
A search-engine friendly web design is just as important as targeting the right keywords. One of the first rules of SEO is not to design your website in a way that prevents it from being properly indexed or "crawled".
A rigid design layout, overuse of web technologies, and a poorly-designed navigation are a few of the common pitfalls you’ll find with poor-ranking websites.
Web Design for the Search Engines Navigation Menus:
If the navigation menus of your website can't be crawled, you could be preventing the search engines from "seeing" many areas of your website. As a result, you could be losing out on search engine rankings for your target keywords.
Flash-based menus and JavaScript jump menus either prevent or hinder the search engine spider from properly indexing your site, especially if they are your only means of navigation. Ideally, you should have a menu that is text-based, with every link containing the keywords you want to target for the destination page.
Having text-based links at the footer of every page, using the same targeted keywords principle, also works.
Sitemaps:
Sitemaps can be a great help in getting your website indexed because it gives a search engine access to every webpage on your site. Adding a link to the sitemap on every webpage ensures easy access to the sitemap from wherever a search engine spider enters your website.
Page Layout:
A good HTML coding structure is the foundation for building an optimized web design. This means having a page layout that allows the spiders go to through the webpage and quickly establish what your site is about without getting bogged down with code.
The areas between the tags and the tags are the two most important for a webpage. Information placed in these areas can make a big difference in your search engine rankings and the level of "friendliness" of your website.
Because search engine spiders read code from left to right, and top to bottom, it's important to have the following as close to the top of the page as possible:
• A page title, short description about the page using the appropriate targeted keywords.
• Your navigational menu or other navigational aids like breadcrumbs. Having a paragraph or two of relevant content appear before the menu is even better.
Placing this information close to the top provides the search engine spiders with text that matches the page title and links pointing to the page in question.
Splash Pages:
Nothing can be worse for a website trying to improve itself than having a splash page for a home page. Reducing your most important page to an entry point with little or no relevant content greatly reduces your chances of ranking well.
If for some reason a splash pages is necessary, there are some things you can do to make it more search-engine friendly:
• Add a paragraph or two of highly relevant content so that the spider can index it, and determine that this the home page of your site.
• Add a text menu to the footer or a link to your sitemap so that the spider can access the rest of your website.
Web Design Technologies Flash Design:
At an SEO conference some years ago, a Google engineer confirmed they were able to index content from Flash movies. However, he added indexing this content didn't add anything useful to their index of the Web.
If you have a Flash-only site, or have pages that are Flash-heavy, consider designing a HTML version of your website, or webpage, or redesign your website so that elements of HTML and Flash are incorporated on the same page.
Designed correctly, this will give your website an interactive, multimedia feel in addition to being indexable.
JavaScript:
Javascript coding may be necessary for certain page features. To a search engine spider, however, this is all clutter it pretty much ignores. Still, it must trudge through this code before reaching the real content. Many spiders have timeouts or maximum character counts associated with them. If they must go through too much irrelevant coding, they'll abandon their spidering and leave the site.
The solution: move the Javascript code to the bottom of the page.
Summary:
Creating or redesigning a website to be search-engine friendly is not difficult, but it can be time-consuming. Although a basic understanding of how search engines work would be beneficial, this checklist of things to look for provides a good basis to help you evaluate your website and make changes where necessary.
Search Engine Friendly Web Design - To learn more about this author, visit Pasquale Spadafora's Website.
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Pasquale Spadafora
(Visit Pasquale's Website)
Pat heads Azatiko Marketing, one of only a
few Montreal SEO
firms that are listed in the SEO
Consultants Directory.
Since 1999, Azatiko Marketing has been
successfully developing and marketing
websites from many different industries,
ensuring every investment made by their
clients generates a positive return. The
dynamic team of web designers and SEO
specialists continuously searches for more
ways to provide a complete online
marketing solution.
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