Web Design and SEO: Why Pretty Isn't Enough

You have it all figured out: the flash on the front page is beautiful and pertinent to the site, your images are lovely and fit well, your articles are well-written and SEO'd, and you even have your SEO marketing plan set up. Everyone who sees it agrees that your site is professional and slick, well-written and informative.

So why isn't anyone coming and why aren't they returning when they do come?

Web site design is deceptively easy to learn, but difficult to master. Professional librarians with PhDs are often hired for the very large sites, just to keep them organized and searchable. Even smaller sites often are harder to navigate than they should be. And hardly anyone does their internal SEO structuring properly.

To tell you everything you need to know would take a couple of books, but some simple things will make your designing life easier and help you create pages that are both beautiful and friendly.

Internal Site Structure: Usability and Navigability

The way your site is linked together, page to page and level to level, is incredibly important to how the search engines look at it and how your human users get along. If you have beautiful Flash navigation bars and a search box, it may look elegant to you but it is NOT searchable, and search engines will not give you proper credit for the site. It is also not friendly for visually-impaired users. At the very least, include a text-link menu at the bottom to take users to all the sister pages to the one they are on.

By the way, a good rule of thumb is to think about how a blind text-dependent viewer would see your site and design for that person. In essence, web spiders, the little programs that document your site and help search engines rank it, "see" your site just like a person who is visually impaired. Makes you think a whole different way about that pretty Flash, doesn't it?

On with internal links. Bread crumb links became a standard of Yahoo! in 1997, and are still very useful today. These links are found at the top of a page and work as a map for the viewer back out to where they were originally. The deeper your site, the more useful bread crumbs are. They look like this:

home : category level 1 : category level 3 : this page

with each level but the last linked back to the main page for that category. You see them used frequently on catalog sites:

home: clothing : girl 's : pantsuits : pink lamb pantsuit

By using these subtle links, you make it easy for your visitors to move back out to any level they want. And if you have these links at the top, with linking at the bottom to sibling pages, you ensure your user can get anywhere they need to go with about two clicks. In large sites, this isn't practical, but in medium sites it can be a godsend.

Also make sure you use a robots.txt file to protect your private stuff: raw images, CGI-bin, and anything you just don't want out on a Google search. This tiny text file goes into your site 's root directory and only takes a minute to set up. If you have a large and complex site and you want to ensure that it 's thoroughly searched, you can use a sitemap file, an XML file (you can use it even if the rest of your site doesn't use XML) that ensures web spiders map every part of your site you want them to.

Lastly in site usability, make sure that on every single page your user has a simple means to contact you, preferably a link to a Contact Me! page. This is often included at the bottom of the page, but some webmasters find it works better somewhere else. Just be sure it stands out in the page.

SEO: Your Site and Your Campaign

Search engine optimization is the life 's blood of web business. If your site is not optimized, it is not visible. While Google has done a number of things to keep you from cheating by keyword stuffing, using gateway pages, and using invisible text, there are many, many things you can do to make your site SEO friendly and ensure that your ranking is as high as is possible.

Start with the rule of thumb from the last section: the blind man, Every single important element on your page should use alt-text to label it, and each one can use a little SEO. That butterfly jumper on your girl 's clothing page? Label it in alt-text girl 's clothing butterfly jumper.It 's that simple. If you have a database-driven site, you can simply ensure you include an alt-text column for each item 's description and include the right HTML in your page templates; if your site is smaller, you'll need to label each image by hand. You don't have to label every image, mind, but each label is going to give you a little boost.

Use pertinent anchor text for each link. If you're linking to girl 's dresses, that phrase should be used as the link to the other page. This is a way of getting a keyword bump for free the search engines assume that this page will be about girl 's dresses. The worst link: the lazy man 's "you can find it HERE", linking the word here.

Avoid overusing Flash. This is one of the most common errors made by people who are excited about beautiful web pages. Get this one thing straight: a site entirely designed as Flash may look impressive, but it is harder to navigate and will not be picked up well by the search engines, no matter what trick or workaround you use. It fails the blind man 's rule. Use Flash sparingly, and as a way to enhance your site, not to impress visitors. One of the few places that uses it well: the Ikea website, where great Flash is used to demonstrate things like putting furniture together. Another good one: Discover.com, where components are often designed in Flash and embedded in HTML pages.

Try not to use duplicate text. The search engines see this as spam, and it can end with your site being penalized. Instead, use unique text on each page.

Finally, optimize your entire site, not just the home page or the articles section. Your site, if it 's like most sites, can be entered at any level. Assume that your reader may come in anywhere, and design accordingly.

About the Author

Randy Zlobec, Search Engine Marketing Expert and owner of a Myrtle Beach Web Designsearch engine optimization and web site design services. company specializing in

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Designing Your Site For The Search Engines

When you design a website, it 's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realize, 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 judgment on your background color. 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 's emantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use the block quote 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 's plash' 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

For More Free Resources visit www.thedesignbuild.com

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Web Design and Implementing Search Engine Optimization

A web site is a collection of data on a specific topic or subject. Web design is the designing and graphical arrangement of the content shown on the internet in the form of websites and web applications using various forms of media.

Designing a website is defined as the arrangement and creation of Web pages that in turn make up a website. The web page consists of data for which the website is designed and developed.

The users of internet are the actual buyers of your products and services and not the search engines. The main problem is if the website is not designed by keeping both the visitors and search engines in mind then the visitors will not be able to view the website.

It 's not that, if you have spent a lot of money does not mean that there will be a number of visitors automatically visiting your site and becomes profitable.

A search engine friendly Website is first and foremost user-friendly, designed and written for your human visitors first. Then the site can be twisted so that is can be easily indexed by the search engines. The phrase "search engine friendly Website" means that the Website programmer is following the rules set forth by the search engines, in order for high keyword rankings to be attained.

There are few very effective approaches for designing a website which is search engine friendly:

The HTML code and the website should be simple and uncomplicated to navigate. Try to create a website that contains basic HTML pages. There should be no use of JavaScript or any other dynamic design styles.

JavaScript generates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search engines would crawl first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.

Allow search engine crawlers to find significant Web pages from any page. Place text links of your main Web pages at the bottom of each of your Web pages, so search engine crawlers can find you're inside pages. Create a Site Map page with all of your Web pages listed on one page, and link to it from your homepage.

The image sizes should be reduced. Too many images or very large images on your Web page will slow down the loading time of your Website. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72dpi. You can also cut large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.

Frames should not be used on the website anywhere.
This is an HTML tag created that allows designers to display two or more Web pages at the same time. The insight is that frames can improve Website navigation, but they are browser-dependant and do not create search engine friendly Websites.

Most search engines do not index framed pages. Frames only allow search engine crawlers to see 1 Webpage, when there are actually a number of web pages on a site.

The website should not be entirely based on flash.
Search engines cannot read Websites built as Flash movies. They cannot read text in a movie file, and also only recognize a numerous page Website for example as only 1 Web page. It is best to create separate HTML page files for your photos, graphics and content, in order to have a search engine friendly Website.

Avoid the use of cookies on your Website. Allow search engines to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of engines is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in your Website not being indexed at all.

There is one other thing that will stop search engines from searching the sub pages of your site is requiring cookies. Sure cookies or session ids may be essential to track visitor activity, but you can make an exception for search engines. Search engine crawlers do not like cookies. Don't require them to accept them or they will simply leave.

Each web page on your site must contain content. The web page must contain a summary paragraph of at least 250 - 500 words. The keywords should be stuffed within this text being careful of not over stuffing the keywords. Aim to please the search engines as well as your Website visitors.

About the Author

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