Internet Marketing

Website Design That's Search-Engine Friendly

SEO professionals stress the importance of having a website that the search engines can index. Indeed, the search engines must be able to access your pages so that your optimization efforts can take effect. The "look and feel" of a website is vitally important in motivating web users to explore the site at a deeper level, as much so as them coming to your site.

Can web design elements such as page layout, images, and
animation negatively affect search engine friendliness?

Designing Web Pages for Search Engines

With respect search engine optimization, consider search engines are blind to website design. In fact, the ideal search-engine friendly webpage has no images, no JavaScript code, no Flash animation, and no tables - just normal, straight-forward keyword-rich text. Of course, this produces a site filled with bland and boring pages.

Images and animation help create an attractive web page, and HTML tables give us control over the page layout. As long as you know what to do, SEO can be combined with great web design to produce a highly attractive and successful site, without sacrificing either aspect.

Effective Internet Marketing - Flash Animation and Images

Some search engines cannot index Flash-only web pages. Hence, they cannot follow the links embedded in them. Designing a Flash-based web page is like having a webpage without links, which from an SEO perspective can be the one of the worse things you can do. And because Flash animations don't contain any text, there is nothing the search engines can use to rank the web page. Adding meta tags to a Flash-based page isn't enough to make a difference.

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Before adding graphics to a webpage, think about the relevancy of the image to the text. Use an ALT tag containing keywords to "optimize" the image. If you use image links, remember that search engine spiders are not able to read your image. Therefore, they cannot index it without a text equivalent nearby.

Internet Marketing - Content Structure

Search-engine friendly website design also relies on how well the content is organized, including how the pages are linked.

Keyword research must first be performed in order to clearly understand the visitors' language and mindset. The best and most relevant keywords will then determine how the content should be structured. The keywords can also be used in the navigation scheme, headings, categories links, etc. The website design and page layout should only be created after the content is organized.

Web Marketing - HTML Tables

Complex HTML tables are not good because they can overwhelm the search engine spider with too much coding. Judicious use of CSS and JavaScript code can lower the page size and make it easier and faster for web pages to load for web users. This can also help for quick indexing.

Unlike HTML tables, CSS coding creates website design layouts that are flexible and easy to maintain.

Web Marketing - Website Design and Search Engine Readiness

Even though you design your website with your visitors in mind, it is also important to keep the search engines as a priority, too. Web design forms an integral part of search engine friendliness - the organic, holistic process aimed at improving search engine rankings.

Treating search-engine friendliness as an afterthought to website design is perhaps the
biggest mistake web designers and site owners can make.

Article Published September 16^th, 2010
Azatiko providing Internet Marketing Services
Montreal, Canada

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