Designing Search Engine Friendly Websites
SEO on a website should begin during the design, redesign or template stage not as an afterthought once the site has been launched.
At the recent London SES conference, Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs touched on this topic in her presentation Designing Search Engine Friendly Websites.
First of all we established what search engine marketing is not: It is not a design created primarily for obtaining top search engine positions. It is actually a user-friendly web design that can be easily found on both the crawler-based search engines and human-based search engines (directories). Does that come as a shock? It shouldn't.
Basically design your website with your target audience in mind first and then consider the human-based and crawler based search engines afterwards.
Equally as important, how your words, graphic images and multimedia files are arranged on a Web page communicates the content that you feel is important to both search engines and to site visitors. When designing any web page, keep in mind the 5 basic rules:
Easy to read – that kind of goes without saying. If its not clear what a web page is about, then the average visitor is going to hit that back button and find a website that does make sense. Maybe one of your competitors!
Easy to navigate – Not everyone is going to enter your website via the homepage. A website that uses a tool such as a breadcrumb menu means your visitor knows their whereabouts at all times so a "sense of place" is established immediately.
Consistent in layout and design – This contributes towards having a sense of place. Your customers need to know they have come to the right place and having both a consistent design and layout establishes a unity throughout the site. This is where careful thought of using white space, CSS, elocution, fonts and color comes into practice.
Quick to download – Even in 2007, not everyone is on broadband. I know at least 2 local villages that do not as yet have broadband. You should strive for your web pages to download in less than 30 seconds on dialup (56 kbit/s). Having said that, the average a visitor will wait for a page to download is less than 15 seconds.
Easy to find – Your customer needs to be able to find your site quickly, so listing it on search engines, related sites and both web and niche directories is a must.
However, the end user also needs to go directly to the relevant page. A visitor will on average click 7-8 times to find the data they need. You should strive to make your pages accessible in less clicks, but visitors can actually click up to 25 times and still feel comfortable.
Keep your most important information above the fold. Touching briefly on FAQ pages, a better (and more user-friendly) approach than listing a question and its answer is to include the questions above the fold and have them link to the section of the page where the answer can be reached quickly. Use a maximum of 8 and make sure they are keyword prominent.
Also include your contact information in a prominent place within your website. Be careful of using footers as these can be overlooked if someone is scanning the page.
All crawlers will at minimum index your text and follow the links on your pages. So provide a means of accessing keyword rich text and a site navigation and URL structure that search engine spiders can easily follow. Without it, your site cannot rank well in the search engines.
So what kind of text should you be using?
• Key Phrases: Including your main key phrases and any other variations that your target audience is typing into search queries to locate your site for a start. Do not include marketing hype. No one searches for "state of the art", "second to none" and so on.
• Focused Content: When visitors view a Web page, does the content appear to be focused? A good test for focused content is to view the web pages for 8 seconds and then turn off. What were your memories of the page? What would you say the page was about? If the page is not targeted then it won’t be effective.
• Visible body text: The main contributing factor to focused content. Your visitors should not have to perform any type of action to view the most important text on your page. The title tag, intro paragraph and concluding paragraph are the main areas. Select all the text in the web browser and then copy visible body text into Notepad. All Search engines use this basic method this to determine relevancy. Another method is to show it to your Mother. Shari does and if it sounds bad, she'll spot it.
The main elements (primary text) a search engine will use to determine relevancy are:
• Title tags
• Visible <body> copy
• Text at the top of a Web page
• In and around hyperlinks
However only some search engines will also consider some secondary elements:
• Meta-tag content
• Alternative text
• Domain and file names (these are rarely used)
How you title and headline your Web pages can impact your site’s link development campaign. It was suggested that if you're not a recognized brand, add your product name to the page title and only include your Company name for non-shopper pages (eg: PR pages, etc) unless you are already a renowned brand such as Tesco
Link Component Site and Page Architecture
It is a fact that some site navigation schemes are more search-engine friendly than others. When designing your site navigation scheme, there are a few things to consider:
• URL structure
• Type of Web page
• Page layout and structure
• Cross-linking
There are many different types of site navigation, listed in order of most user-friendly first:
• Text Links
• Navigation buttons
• Image maps
• Menus (form and DHTML)
• Flash
If a dynamic menu is functional without any JavaScript, then engines will crawl it with no problem. However, search crawlers can't fill out forms.
Having said that, if a site navigation scheme isn't search engine friendly, should you use it at all in your page design? Well yes, you should. It was advised to have at least 2 forms of navigation on your website: One for your target audience and one for your search engines. They often compliment each other. For example your visitors may like to navigate your site using that innovative image map, but not everyone can display images and the text links below the image map act as a back up.
An effective way to emphasise your keyword rich content, is embed links in your content. This can be used in a number of pages, for example to link to the biographies of professional staff or links to the main news and media section.
This works because, not only because your key phrases are in or next to the anchor text, but also the blue links stand out better on copy. But one point to note: it is easy to overdo it so don’t cross that line.
Cross-linking
Along with a spider-friendly navigation scheme, all sites should have cross links.
• Hierarchical (vertical) Breadcrumb and contextual links
• Related Links (horizontal) Press releases, other news/media pages and product pages.
Information Pages vs Doorway Pages
Information pages are always good for the end user. Whether they are FAQs, glossary, product page or How to page, they contain the factual information that your target audience (and the search engine spiders) are interested in and are often in a simpler layout than the rest of your site pages. How many times do you use a search engine to find information? It pays for these vital pages to be keyword-focused for maximum benefit.
We've all come across doorway pages, the pages that are put together by spammers to trick the search engines into ranking them. So how can search engines distinguish between an information page and a doorway page?
Information Pages
• Primary goal is to provide information
• Match the rest of your Website
• Reside on your Web server
• No extra click(s)
• High-quality link development
• End user and spider see the same page
Doorway Pages
• Primary goal is ranking only.
• Are typically text-only pages with gibberish
• Often reside on doorway page company’s server.
• Extra clicks and/or redirects.
• Low-quality link development.
• End user and spider do NOT see the same page.
Your page layout should be designed with the acronym MPABS (Most People are Basically Stupid) in mind. Sounds offensive, but the average visitor shouldn’t have to figure things out: The message should be clear and any calls to action should be clear and either at the front or centre (an image illustrating a call to action is effective as your eye is naturally drawn to it.
Tip: Be wary of companies that claim to build information pages. There are many factors that raise a red flag with the search engines and any of the following can land your site in hot water:
• Doorway pages/domains
• Hallway pages
• Envelope pages
• Mini or micro sites
• Satellite sites
• Attraction pages
• Magnet sites
• Channel pages
• Shadow domains
• Theme-based sites/pages
• Directory information pages (DIP)
• SEE pages (search engine entry pages)
• Advertising pages
• Instant link popularity
• Permanent positions
• Guaranteed positions
• Country-specific engines
So What is Popularity?
There are many ways other measuring popularity on your website. In the simplest terms possible, do your visitors
• Continue navigating your site?
• Link to your site?
• Bookmark your site?
• Return to your site?
There are many factors that affect a site's popularity. In a recent survey, 61% of people interviewed said they would leave a website due to poor performance. On further elaboration, the performance would vary from lack of ease in navigation to confusing design.
Other Design Considerations
Of course no website would be complete without a home page, but even this requires some careful planning.
We’ve all felt the utter frustration when the web owner insists that his website must have Splash page either containing a lot of graphics or a Flash introduction. Search engines hate Splash pages, but there is an effective workaround: For Splash Pages, you can display the art above the fold in a style of splash page and visible text below for end users to read. For Flash movies, the magic text link words, Skip Intro enables the spiders to crawl past this page and visit the rest of your site.
Whatever type of website you are designing, your page should at least have:
• Search-engine friendly characteristics to include in your home page:
• Keyword-rich text
• At least one spider-friendly navigation scheme
• Link to the most important sections in your site
• Visible link to a site map
At the recent London SES conference, Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs touched on this topic in her presentation Designing Search Engine Friendly Websites.
First of all we established what search engine marketing is not: It is not a design created primarily for obtaining top search engine positions. It is actually a user-friendly web design that can be easily found on both the crawler-based search engines and human-based search engines (directories). Does that come as a shock? It shouldn't.
Basically design your website with your target audience in mind first and then consider the human-based and crawler based search engines afterwards.
Equally as important, how your words, graphic images and multimedia files are arranged on a Web page communicates the content that you feel is important to both search engines and to site visitors. When designing any web page, keep in mind the 5 basic rules:
Easy to read – that kind of goes without saying. If its not clear what a web page is about, then the average visitor is going to hit that back button and find a website that does make sense. Maybe one of your competitors!
Easy to navigate – Not everyone is going to enter your website via the homepage. A website that uses a tool such as a breadcrumb menu means your visitor knows their whereabouts at all times so a "sense of place" is established immediately.
Consistent in layout and design – This contributes towards having a sense of place. Your customers need to know they have come to the right place and having both a consistent design and layout establishes a unity throughout the site. This is where careful thought of using white space, CSS, elocution, fonts and color comes into practice.
Quick to download – Even in 2007, not everyone is on broadband. I know at least 2 local villages that do not as yet have broadband. You should strive for your web pages to download in less than 30 seconds on dialup (56 kbit/s). Having said that, the average a visitor will wait for a page to download is less than 15 seconds.
Easy to find – Your customer needs to be able to find your site quickly, so listing it on search engines, related sites and both web and niche directories is a must.
However, the end user also needs to go directly to the relevant page. A visitor will on average click 7-8 times to find the data they need. You should strive to make your pages accessible in less clicks, but visitors can actually click up to 25 times and still feel comfortable.
Keep your most important information above the fold. Touching briefly on FAQ pages, a better (and more user-friendly) approach than listing a question and its answer is to include the questions above the fold and have them link to the section of the page where the answer can be reached quickly. Use a maximum of 8 and make sure they are keyword prominent.
Also include your contact information in a prominent place within your website. Be careful of using footers as these can be overlooked if someone is scanning the page.
All crawlers will at minimum index your text and follow the links on your pages. So provide a means of accessing keyword rich text and a site navigation and URL structure that search engine spiders can easily follow. Without it, your site cannot rank well in the search engines.
So what kind of text should you be using?
• Key Phrases: Including your main key phrases and any other variations that your target audience is typing into search queries to locate your site for a start. Do not include marketing hype. No one searches for "state of the art", "second to none" and so on.
• Focused Content: When visitors view a Web page, does the content appear to be focused? A good test for focused content is to view the web pages for 8 seconds and then turn off. What were your memories of the page? What would you say the page was about? If the page is not targeted then it won’t be effective.
• Visible body text: The main contributing factor to focused content. Your visitors should not have to perform any type of action to view the most important text on your page. The title tag, intro paragraph and concluding paragraph are the main areas. Select all the text in the web browser and then copy visible body text into Notepad. All Search engines use this basic method this to determine relevancy. Another method is to show it to your Mother. Shari does and if it sounds bad, she'll spot it.
The main elements (primary text) a search engine will use to determine relevancy are:
• Title tags
• Visible <body> copy
• Text at the top of a Web page
• In and around hyperlinks
However only some search engines will also consider some secondary elements:
• Meta-tag content
• Alternative text
• Domain and file names (these are rarely used)
How you title and headline your Web pages can impact your site’s link development campaign. It was suggested that if you're not a recognized brand, add your product name to the page title and only include your Company name for non-shopper pages (eg: PR pages, etc) unless you are already a renowned brand such as Tesco
Link Component Site and Page Architecture
It is a fact that some site navigation schemes are more search-engine friendly than others. When designing your site navigation scheme, there are a few things to consider:
• URL structure
• Type of Web page
• Page layout and structure
• Cross-linking
There are many different types of site navigation, listed in order of most user-friendly first:
• Text Links
• Navigation buttons
• Image maps
• Menus (form and DHTML)
• Flash
If a dynamic menu is functional without any JavaScript, then engines will crawl it with no problem. However, search crawlers can't fill out forms.
Having said that, if a site navigation scheme isn't search engine friendly, should you use it at all in your page design? Well yes, you should. It was advised to have at least 2 forms of navigation on your website: One for your target audience and one for your search engines. They often compliment each other. For example your visitors may like to navigate your site using that innovative image map, but not everyone can display images and the text links below the image map act as a back up.
An effective way to emphasise your keyword rich content, is embed links in your content. This can be used in a number of pages, for example to link to the biographies of professional staff or links to the main news and media section.
This works because, not only because your key phrases are in or next to the anchor text, but also the blue links stand out better on copy. But one point to note: it is easy to overdo it so don’t cross that line.
Cross-linking
Along with a spider-friendly navigation scheme, all sites should have cross links.
• Hierarchical (vertical) Breadcrumb and contextual links
• Related Links (horizontal) Press releases, other news/media pages and product pages.
Information Pages vs Doorway Pages
Information pages are always good for the end user. Whether they are FAQs, glossary, product page or How to page, they contain the factual information that your target audience (and the search engine spiders) are interested in and are often in a simpler layout than the rest of your site pages. How many times do you use a search engine to find information? It pays for these vital pages to be keyword-focused for maximum benefit.
We've all come across doorway pages, the pages that are put together by spammers to trick the search engines into ranking them. So how can search engines distinguish between an information page and a doorway page?
Information Pages
• Primary goal is to provide information
• Match the rest of your Website
• Reside on your Web server
• No extra click(s)
• High-quality link development
• End user and spider see the same page
Doorway Pages
• Primary goal is ranking only.
• Are typically text-only pages with gibberish
• Often reside on doorway page company’s server.
• Extra clicks and/or redirects.
• Low-quality link development.
• End user and spider do NOT see the same page.
Your page layout should be designed with the acronym MPABS (Most People are Basically Stupid) in mind. Sounds offensive, but the average visitor shouldn’t have to figure things out: The message should be clear and any calls to action should be clear and either at the front or centre (an image illustrating a call to action is effective as your eye is naturally drawn to it.
Tip: Be wary of companies that claim to build information pages. There are many factors that raise a red flag with the search engines and any of the following can land your site in hot water:
• Doorway pages/domains
• Hallway pages
• Envelope pages
• Mini or micro sites
• Satellite sites
• Attraction pages
• Magnet sites
• Channel pages
• Shadow domains
• Theme-based sites/pages
• Directory information pages (DIP)
• SEE pages (search engine entry pages)
• Advertising pages
• Instant link popularity
• Permanent positions
• Guaranteed positions
• Country-specific engines
So What is Popularity?
There are many ways other measuring popularity on your website. In the simplest terms possible, do your visitors
• Continue navigating your site?
• Link to your site?
• Bookmark your site?
• Return to your site?
There are many factors that affect a site's popularity. In a recent survey, 61% of people interviewed said they would leave a website due to poor performance. On further elaboration, the performance would vary from lack of ease in navigation to confusing design.
Other Design Considerations
Of course no website would be complete without a home page, but even this requires some careful planning.
We’ve all felt the utter frustration when the web owner insists that his website must have Splash page either containing a lot of graphics or a Flash introduction. Search engines hate Splash pages, but there is an effective workaround: For Splash Pages, you can display the art above the fold in a style of splash page and visible text below for end users to read. For Flash movies, the magic text link words, Skip Intro enables the spiders to crawl past this page and visit the rest of your site.
Whatever type of website you are designing, your page should at least have:
• Search-engine friendly characteristics to include in your home page:
• Keyword-rich text
• At least one spider-friendly navigation scheme
• Link to the most important sections in your site
• Visible link to a site map
Labels: search engine friendly, ses london, web design
Posted: 07 March 2007
1 Comments:
Nice and length post!
Thanks for that, i actually believe that SEO can begin at the point of domain purchase.
Not just keywords or word in a domain but also the extension chosen in terms of GEO targetting, then of course choice of host and then design is the third stage.
Although of course one may design the site prior to domain name / hosting purchase too.
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