Web Design for Search Engine Optimization

Make no mistake- search engine optimization is a marketing effort, one that uses good web design and rich content that gives your website high ranks in the search engine results pages. Good SEO marketing actually puts more focus on how you build your website for your target visitors, instead on relying on techniques soley focused on search engines.

What you should know

Search engines would want websites of the highest quality to appear on the first page of their results. The first few websites displayed will certainly be the most popular and the most relevant. These are sites that web users access and actually enjoy, and search engines notice by the amount of traffic it has. Here are a few tips for your website architecture to get you started:

Usability and Accesibility

• Make sure your website is easy to navigate - By now you know enough to put your site menu on every page of your website. For a well-optimized site, it is recommended that any information should be no more than 3 mouse clicks away (some information, like your contact info- should be one click away). Avoid links that are too deep for your visitors (and the search engine web crawlers-) to get to.
• Fancy Flash and JavaScript links are nice, but normal HTML links are better -New web technologies allow websites to have nifty looking ways to access content to their website. Some may find these things cumbersome, they just want a quick way to get to the page. So if you must use Flash and JavaScript on your page, you may want to include HTML links as a quick alternative for your visitors.
• Test your links - Always test them to see if they all work properly. You don't want your links to be broken or worse- point to a wrong page. Thats major points against your site from the SEO perspective.
• Make your pages load fast - Search engines can measure how fast your pages load. A fully optimized site should have quick loading times. This means all your images shouldn't slow down your site. There are a lot of ways fo compress image files lying around. For videos, some sites also show low-res alternatives to the full versions which some people prefer because they load faster.

Follow Good Web Design Standards

• Make your website pleasing to the eye - How do search engines know how good your site design is? By taking note how many people visit it and how often. Bad web design scares away visitors, so from a SEO standpoint, you would definitely consider how your webswite looks. These also include the use of elements that can ruin the user expeience, such as pop-up windows, use of multimedia files that can slow your loading times.
• Use text -If you're using SEO for a particular keyword or phrase, have it appear as text. Search engines can't read words which appear in an image file.
• Avoid the use of frames - Using frames to split your site into sections with the intention of retaining certain elements of your site such as headers can be a bad idea in terms of SEO. The reason for this is due to the fact that when you use frames on your site, the URLs in the address bar don't change, making it hard for the search engines to index and rank your pages.

Focusing on good web design sensibilities helps your SEO efforts a great deal. It makes it easy for the search engine web crawlers find your content and at the same time makes it easy for your visitors to browse your site and thus allowing them to stay longer.

Good web design lays the groundwork for something your visitors (and search engines) actually go for. Your website content.

Find out how Pear Logic can help your organization today!