Internet Marketing Blog

Basic SEO Tips for Designers – Part 1

February 6, 2009 – 12:59 pm

It’s been a while since we posted any blogs on SEO, so we’ve decided to develop a series of them which will be spread out through the course of the month.

As many of you know, site architecture, content and design go hand-in-hand when optimizing a website.  We have so many clients and prospects that come to us with fully flash-loaded websites, or static sites with little content, and sometimes even ecommerce websites that publish software that is hazardous for the search engines.

We rarely request that a website be completely ‘torn down’ and rebuilt, unless of course it is made fully in flash.  However, we are big believers in incorporating the latest web design trends to your website so that it remains appealing to web users and customers.

So if you are a designer, here are some tips to consider when designing a search engine friendly website:

Tip 1:  Less Images and More Text:

Not all search engines have the full capacity to read or understand images.  A lot of designers turn important texts (including keywords) into images. They do it mainly to point the visitor’s focus on something. If you think from an SEO perspective, in such a situation, it is always better to put CSS into play. If it is important to use images, do not forget to use alt attributes. Compare these two websites:

Tip 2:  External CSS and Java Script files:

There is no need to make the page heavier than what it necessary.  Apart from that, on-page CSS pushes the content further down. In such situations, search engines may not give enough value to the content. To add to this, on-page Java Script often hinders search engine’s crawling. You must make sure that the search engines get a clean and clear passage to read the content. It is better to test your site in Lynx. The result is close to how search engines will see you.

Tip 3:  Push Important Links Up:

As far as search engines are concerned, footer links and site-wide links have somewhat lost their importance. Thus, it is important that you link to internal pages from the content.

Tip 4:  Straight to the Content:

A lot of websites place a big image on the home page and ask the visitors to click on the image to enter the website. In some cases this technique is justified. For example, if your website caters to both job seekers and employers, you can create such a page to offer a different set of pages. However, if the job seekers are the only target audience of your blog, is there any need to create such a splash page?

Tip 5:  No Flash Content and Less Ajax:

Flash designs look great. They can easily communicate with the target market. Some major search engines are also learning to read some parts of flash files. Thus, if you want to get traffic from search engines, it is better to avoid complete Flash designs. The same rule applies to Ajax. Apart from that, Flash takes longer than average time to load. You may loose a hard earned visitor for the reason. And do not put links in Flash (navigational links in flash or JS)

Tip 6:  KISS

KISS is the best strategy as far as web product development (design, content, module etc.) is concerned. It helps both visitors and search engines.

In my next post, I will talk about some other issues of web designing and advanced SEO. So, stay tuned….