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Designing Your Site For The Search Engines |
by:
Angie Noack |
When you design a website, 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 with a completely 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 is the content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of
probably the largest 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.
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways:
you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the
navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are.
As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the heading
tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things
clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic'
HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use
the blockquote tag; if you're posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent.
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with
keywords in hope of a higher search ranking ? the 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 don't,
in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to
insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines
to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to have just the
text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page 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 want the search 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: the 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 as
the ranking itself ? write something here that will look useful to
the searcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through.
Don't forget that, while search engines are just machines and algorithms,
the end result of it all does involve a human decision: to click, or
not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages.
You might think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page displaying
a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) 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 use a graphic, include alt text for it ? especially
if there is text in the graphic. 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, at the same time, the
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, and
the best way to design for search engines is to make your content
really stand out.
About the author:
Angie is the lead web designer for a fortune 500 company. Read her thoughts on web design on her blog... http://www.webdesignblogonline.com
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