A Search Engine Friendly Web Design Approach: TipsCan Make or Break Your Search Engine Ranking?!
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Jimsun Lui July 12, 2006
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Online marketers understand the importance of getting top search
engine rankings in major search engines. Therefore, they spend many
time in optimizing website content. However, many of them ignore the
fact that web design structure has a role in search engine optimization
(SEO). To acquire high ranking, you cannot just rely on web designers
because they could be good at web design but not good at SEO. This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process. 1. CSS Stylesheet It
is good to use CSS stylesheet to format your web design because it can
standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of
convenience, some web designers use internal CSS. It is no good! You
should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes
consise, and mainly compose of your website content. It is an essential
SEO practice. 2. Content Management Software (CMS) If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features: a.
Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages.
It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content. b. Allows
you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it
gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page. c. Allows you
to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines
are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster
guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters
within the URL. If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make. 3. HTML Code Compliance As
a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to
some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search
engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause
difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It
hinders your website to get top search engine ranking. 4. Use of Graphics You
must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to
read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of
your website, whenever it is possible. 5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu Many
websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript. However, the
coding usually leaves in the HTML body. This is no good in terms of
SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external
Javascript file. For example, Marketshare - an Asia technology market research firm,
found that their website cannot get indexed properly by several search
engines. This situation has been changed only after adopting external
Javascript. 6. Bad Web Design To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding: a.
Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your
frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only
access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website
from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu
with a blank page on the right-hand side. b. Re-direct
techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct
pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors
from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers
usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website. 7. Flash Web
designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro
page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website
more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website.
However, it is not always the case. Visitors want to find
information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and
require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website.
In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a
graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication
means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking. Conclusion: For
small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO
and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot
give you any business as no one can find your website from search
engines and if it annoys your visitors. |