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Designing Your Site For The Search Engines |
by:
Angie Noack |
When you designwebsite, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitor withcompletely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they're not going to be passing judgement on your background colour. What they're looking for iscontent and structure of your page.
They'research engine spiders, and they are in control of probablylargest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.
Make Your Structure Clear.
Resisttemptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be very clear tosearch engine wherenavigation is, wherecontent is, and whereheadings are. Asrule, put navigation first in your page. Always useheading tags (hone, htwo, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things clear touser through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, useblockquote tag; if you're posting program code, usecode tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent.
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope ofhigher search ranking –engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic – but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website' throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would bring down my rankings.
HTML and Javascript.
It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they do not, in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to insert text into your page isbad idea if you want search engines to seetext. Onother hand, you might want to have justtext in HTML and insert allother parts ofpage with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you wantsearch engines to follow them.
Use Meta Tags.
Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site, but they're still important in one way:meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines' users see when they find your site in their results! This can be just as important asranking itself – write something here that will look useful tosearcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through. Don't forget that, while search engines are just machines and algorithms,end result of it all does involvehuman decision: to click, or not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages.
You might think it'sgreat idea to have'splash' page displayingfull-page version of your logo (orad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would usually be, so you should avoid it – it's annoying to visitors anyway.
Include Alt Tags.
Any time you usegraphic, include alt text for it – especially if there is text ingraphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn't, then you'll be turning search engines away.
Finally, Write Great Content.
The key with modern search engines (and, atsame time,thing you have least control over) is how many people decide to link to your page from their page. How can you make more people link to you? Make your content useful. Make it something they'll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it's ever been, andbest way to design for search engines is to make your content really stand out.
Aboutauthor:
Angie islead web designer forfortune fivezerozero company. Read her thoughts on web design on her blog... http://www.webdesignblogonline.com
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