Web Design and SEO Part I

Web Design and Search Engine Marketing -
Part I of II

By Alex Skorohodov

Here at Kosmos Central, a Portland web design company, we strive to keep abreast of emerging technologies by constantly monitoring the marketplace and adopting the best practices available to the industry. In offering custom web design, ecommerce, RMS ecommerce, custom web development and services, and web marketing, we believe our proactive outlook is necessary in a business environment that’s as eclectic and dynamic as the one here in Portland, Oregon.

Good web design requires a comprehensive approach that builds on the synergy between strong information hierarchies, intuitive navigation systems, logo identity, graphic web design that pushes concepts while supporting content, and a marketing strategy that empowers a site by linking it to users in a sustainable way that maintains a good ROI. What follows is a brief outline of best practices for web design.

Titles and Text

A website exists so that a company, organization, or even an individual can communicate with a broad base of users. 99% of this communication is accomplished by those users reading content, so it’s incredibly important that a site be well-written, well-organized, and easy-to-read.

It’s much easier for people to digest information in small, related blocks; it’s quicker and it requires less time to get concepts across. Because the web is an extremely fast-paced environment, it’s vital that your site be broken up properly into pages of related content, with appropriate and meaningful headings for each content block. Search engines acknowledge the need for good content design and will reward sites that contain well-structured and meaningful content with greater ranking than sites that are poorly organized.

In creating an SEO-friendly site, a newspaper is a good model to follow. Newspapers are broken up into major sections (pages) of related content. In those sections, there are headlines (html headings), which indicate the contents of a story (paragraph or content block). Like a newspaper story, the contents of an html page should be structured as pyramid of information. The first paragraph should be a synopsis, a quick overview of all the concepts (or keywords, for the web) and following paragraphs should cover those concepts in-depth, becoming more detailed as one reads on.

Menu and Navigation

The best practice for creating the navigation on a website is to make it as intuitive and consistent as possible. In general, we find it helpful to imagine sites as big old trees. The trunk is the home page, the leaves are the paragraphs and everything in the middle is the structure that we use to navigate between the two. It’s easy to imagine how it might be hard to find a specific leaf if we didn’t have branches to travel on. So, to prevent your site from being confusing, create a menu that has a relatively small number of initial links and then becomes increasingly detailed, just like the branches of our tree. If you have more than 10 main menu items, it’s probably an indication that you’re trying to attach leaves directly to the trunk, and this ultimately means that you’re forcing your users to spend more time and energy to find what they’re looking for.

Additionally, HTML is always a preferred system of navigation, as it’s more widely supported than flash menus and can be easily crawled by search engine spiders attempting to index a site.

Breadcrumb trails are a helpful element in any navigation system, as they quickly indicate where a user is, and where they have already been. When coupled with a strong menu system, breadcrumb trails will make a site eminently navigable and prevent users from becoming confused and leaving for another site.

Example: home » web marketing » campaigns » sponsored links

As part of a strong navigation system, all sites should have an xml or text-link site-map for search engine spiders and site visitors to review as a one-stop gateway to all internal pages.

In Part II, I will discuss web marketing design that involves internet linking, images and animation, overall design and things to avoid.

Web Design and SEO Part II