SEO Web Design - Part 1 |
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For almost every e-Commerce site, search engines play an important role in generating and maximizing targeted web traffic. Unfortunately, many websites do poorly, or don't rank at all, with the search engines because they failed to take into account how search engines work. 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 indexed by the search engines. Inflexible web design, overuse of advanced web technologies, and a poorly-designed site navigation system are a few of the common pitfalls you'll find with poor-ranking websites. Web Design for the Search EnginesNavigation 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 other search engine rankings. Flash menus and JavaScript jump menus (like this one at http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/online-course/standards/jumpmenu.htm) 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 a text-based menu 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 spider 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 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 found between the <head></head> tags and the <body></body> tags are the two most important areas of a webpage. Information placed in these areas can make a big difference in your search engine rankings and the "friendliness" of your website. Because search engine spiders read code from left to right, top to bottom, it's important to have the following as close to the top of the page as possible:
Placing this information close to the top provides the spiders and the search engines with text that matches the page title and backlinks. 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 slightly more search-engine friendly:
More on Search Friendly WebsitesIn the second part of this article, we'll look at the Web technologies to avoid and/or better manage in order to ensure your website's compatibility with the search engines. In the meantime, learn what the major search engines look for in a website. Follow the links below to the web design guidelines laid out by the major search engines:
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