Web Designer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization by Sitecritic
.Net
From a search engine point of view, the perfect webpage has no graphics, no
scripting, no tables...etc but just alot of normal, plain readable text. You
can just take it that plain text is the food for search engine spiders.
Therefore, the more text you have, the more you will keep the spiders happy.
However, from the design point of view, such pages are very boring but the fact
is that everyone is more interested in keeping the spiders rather than us
happy. The argument is that if search engine spiders cannot find your site, no
one will. Based on this philosophy, we witnessed the fall of flash and sites
with strong graphics over the years. Many sites that utilized heavy graphics
where no longer found. Web developers become happy because they have an excuse
to create less impressive websites...
The question is can we make both the saerch engine spiders and us happy? The
answer is definitely a "Yes" provided that web designers can follow certain
rules when designing web pages. They need to step out of their comfort zone and
learn abit more about new web technologies.
Domain Name and URL Naming Convention Having a proper domain and url name is
quite often neglected. Many search engines actually put some weightage in the
way you name your domain or url files. You will definitely want to include some
juicy words in your naming convention. For example, if you site is about
website critics and your url is http://www.sitecritic.com
, this will definitely be better than a domain like bluefish .com or someting.
The same principle goes for hyperlinks. If you have 2 words as key words, you
can use an underscore "_" or dash "-" to separate them.
Title Do not fool around when writing the title. From my experience, this is
the most important part of your webpage. Many designers like to put special
characters such as " * "," | ", " : " or " [ ] " in the title to make it look
unique. If you really want to make your webpage special, I advise you to do it
else where such as in the body of the HTML document. You should include your
keywords in your title. Like the previous example, if your web site focuses on
website reviews, make sure you have the words "Website Reviews" somewhere in
the title. Noticed that "WebsiteReviews" is not the same as "Website Reviews".
Spacing is important.
When writing the title, try not to write more than 8 words. There are no hard
and fast rules on that but the fact is that more does not mean good. In fact,
the more you write, the more your keyword density will be diminished. If you
keep repeating the same keyword in the title, search engines will see your site
as spam and you will be dead in no time. For example, a title like "Sitecritic
Web Reviews" is much better than "Sitecritic Web Reviews, Internet Marketing,
Web Design Ideas, Internet Directories, Budget Web Hosting, Melbourne". I will
have to stress again, do not fool around with your title.
Meta-Description After the title tag is the meta description tag. Many people
argued that meta description is no longer important. Based on my experience,
they are still relevant in SEO rankings especially if your website is new. The
principle in writing the meta description tag is the same as the title. The
only difference is that you want explain abit more about the services that you
provide in a friendlier format. You will also want to include your keywords in
the meta description.
Menu, Content and Links You should not use any javascript menus that hid the
urls. Many javascript menus are fancy but actually not SEO friendly. What ever
technique you are using to create the menus, make sure that the tag is visible.
You might also want to include a variation of the keywords in the menus, links
or text. Like the previous example, if your keyword is "Web Site Reviews", you
might not want to use the same word over and over again. You can vary it by
using "Professional Web Reviews, Reviews of Websites, Site Reviews...etc".
Varying the keywords makes your content more interesting and is good for SEO as
well.
When writing the contents, try to put the keywords in different areas of the
document. Use tags like or to make the keywords stand out. Avoid urls that say
"click here" or "view". Though often used, they are not advisable for SEO
purposes.
Text links are stonger than image links. It is therefore not advisable to use
images as the main navigation menu throughout the website. If you would like to
incorporate images in the user navigation experience, you might want to
consider separating the text from the images. This can be achieved easily using
CSS or the background image option in the or tag.
Images Unlike many Search Engine Experts, I strongly encourage the use of
graphics because I am passion about Web Design and is sad to see so many
websites that are well optimized for search engines but look crap on screen.
You need to balance between the amount of graphics used and downloading speed.
Like I mentioned before, if your header banner or important images contains
text , you could split up the text and use the images as a separate background
or floating layer. That way, you can make the image size smaller and also make
the text visible to the search engines. Transparent gifs are very useful for
laying over other content or images. Appropriate use of jpegs and gifs can also
cut down loading time by alot.
CSS Technology CSS helps you to cut down your tag and gives more room for the
spiders to read your content. The problem with CSS is that it is not as
straight forward as tables. At the moment, CSS is also inconsistent in
different browsers, so before you publish your web page, you need to check the
layout in different browsers. I am actually not against designers using tables
especially if they find the time spend in creating a full CSS site not
justifiable. The fact is that there are still cases when using CSS is not
advisable. An example is when displaying tabular data; Tables still excel in
displaying tabular data at the moment. Unless you are using complex nested
tables, the , or tags should not pose too much of a problem for the search
engine spiders.
Conclusion Web pages should not be boring and web designers should not bow down
to the Google revolution. A well designed site combines both form and function
and yet, still able to be search engine friendly. I strongly believe that this
can be easily achieved if website designers are able to follow very basic rules
in designing their web sites.
About the Author
Sitecritic.net is formed by a group of
web addicts, mainly volunteers from all over the world. Our goal is to create a
community of web designers and developers who share the common interest in
bringing out the best in creatiing effective web sites.
|
