The importance of Search Engine Friendly Website Design
Some people think that the design of a website has nothing to do with the SEO or Search Engine Optimization of a website. However, this is a completely wrong assumption. Search Engine Optimization is affected by a number of factors, which include both on-page optimization as well as off-site or off-page optimization techniques.
Title Tags, Meta Keywords and Meta Description Tags, along with the website content and keywords used in the body content all contribute towards the on-site or on-page factors. What webmasters sometimes ignore is that the design and development of a website is also another factor which affects Search Engine Rankings.
A website can be designed with a table layout or it can be made div-based. The DIV based design uses CSS styling to control the layout of the entire page. Since most of the design is controlled through the CSS Style Sheets, the HTML code of the web pages itself decreases considerably, hence improving the Text to HTML ratio of every page of the website. This improvement helps in on-page optimization and hence, can lead to improved Search Engine Rankings.
Having a Search Engine Friendly website is important for improved Search Engine Rankings. Some webmasters focus on making their websites W3C compliant. However, it should be taken into consideration that W3C standards are over-hyped and making websites compliant is not extremely necessary.
Other factors which contribute to having a Search Engine Friendly website include the following:
- Text based navigation
- Good Internal Linking of the web pages
- Website Sitemap
Other things to avoid are the following:
- Flash navigation
- JavaScript drop down navigations
- Use of Frames
- Flash based website
So when you design and develop your website, make sure you follow the above listed points to make it as Search Engine Friendly as possible. Stay tuned for more tips on making search engine friendly websites.
Kelli Myers said,
May 7, 2008 @ 2:56 am
It is true that while building a website, the search engine optimization should be kept in mind. I do not totally agree with the fact that we should avoid Flash based website, since flash websites attract more visitors and are more compelling. Now-a-days there are ways to optimize a flash website and if done properly it can rank well in the search engines. Some flash optimization tips can be found here.
Joel McLaughlin said,
May 23, 2008 @ 7:39 pm
I agree completely, we shy away from Flash design because the flexibility and search engine optimization capabilities are limited. I performance Phoenix website design and search optimization at http://www.dataflurry.com
Zeeshan Nasir said,
June 4, 2008 @ 5:51 am
If you want more presence, traffic and ranking on internet then your website design must be SEO friendly. Today, thousands of online businesses are implementing search engine optimization techniques in website designing for greater visibility and growth rates. On-page and off-page optimization is being heavily practiced by webmasters & SEO firms for websites to be noticed by search engines to improve traffic, ranking and business as well.
An SEO friendly website uses HTML techniques. Proper structuring and designing your HTML content is the ultimate issue for SEO friendly websites. I am expanding and adding into factors that have been mentioned;
•Use HTML page content that is informative for visitors and also useful for search engines. Put keywords in your content wherever possible and avoid repetition and Spamdexing
•Optimize graphics; use Alt Tag
•Use Bullets & apply Text styles like (bold, italic)
•Try to put links of other important web pages on main page
I partially agree with Kelli Myers that Flash based websites attract more visitors. Generally, people are reluctant to visit fully featured flash websites because they take much time to load in browsers or sometimes flash plug-in is not found on visitors end so another problem arises.
But if we look on other side of picture, it contributes only for conveying message. Designer should make it brief & comprehensive. By putting some emotional touch it can work better. Yeh, if you are targeting kids or teenagers, then I emphasize to use flash for attraction.
Though there are some SEO tools and side-ways available for Flash but they are not very effective. In the end crawlers face problems while indexing Flash pages. If you think Flash will attract more visitors (that happens 1 or 2%) or you really need it, then use Flash content within HTML pages, apply targeted keywords in Title, Meta Tags and page names. Furthermore, add description about Flash content in HTML so that search engine can crawl. But it is not compared to a true search engine friendly website.
It is recommended that if you are considering your website to work as search engine friendly then “Do not develop a 100% Flash site. It is best approach to develop a website with more HTML text and appropriate ratio of graphics; that makes it attractive for visitors and search engines.
Kathy said,
June 7, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
Um, Kelli… how can a flash website attract more visitors when you have to jump through a thousand hoops to get them read by the search engines?
The article you linked to says it all.. “The main problem with Flash is that search engines don’t yet understand it, and probably won’t in the near future. Flash includes logic and can take input from the visitor, but search engines are designed to handle static content. Flash is actually a running program, so it’s much harder to analyze than plain HTML code.”
If you’re going to create a flash based website which acts as a virtual brochure, then go with that. If you want to create a website that is search engine friendly, then AVOID FLASH AT ALL COSTS!!!
Website search engine optimisation said,
November 3, 2008 @ 3:48 am
Good post. I want to know that if the site takes time more than normal to open,
can it affect on ranking?