Web Design and SEO Part II

Web Design and Search Engine Marketing - Part II of II
By Alex Skorohodov Sept-2007

As discussed in Part I, good web design requires a comprehensive approach that incorporates synergy between intuitive navigation systems that supports, content, including titles and text, and utilized good marketing strategies.  Part II we will follow up with good web design and discuss internal linking, images, animation, overall design and what to stay away from.

Internal Linking

Links should always use descriptive text that directly references the content that they link to. “Click here for more” is a terrible example of link text, as it tells absolutely nothing about what “more” really means. It becomes necessary for a person or machine (in the case of spiders) to waste time analyzing the precedent or antecedent content to find out what the link is really about. If properly labeled, one only has to read the link to know where it leads. It may help to think about “key-words” when determining link text; for example, if you have a site all about buttons, and you need to link to a page specifically about green buttons, good link text might be, “green button information.” This will help build key-word or key-phrase credibility, increasing how it will be valued by outside web sites and search engines when determining page rank.   

Images and Animation

Images on a site should always have an “alt tag,” an html tag that acts as a label for that image. In addition to helping people who are visually impaired experience your site, it will create value for that image in the eyes of search engine spiders, who would otherwise have only the file name to just its importance by.

If possible, refrain from using images as a primary method of linking content, as a text link will pass on its keyword to the search engine as credit to that page, and images do not offer keyword credit.

Flash animation, for the most part, is a poor avenue for getting content to your users. In addition to excluding some users outright (although it’s less than 10%), search engines do not index content included in a Flash movie; this creates another barrier between a site and potential users, as it may never be found! If a site is being created with the intent of referring traffic only by means other than internet searches, Flash becomes a more attractive option because of all the interactive capabilities it offers.

Overall Design

Download times should be carefully controlled. Studies consistently show that if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load completely, many users will abandon it for another. All graphics and images should be compressed or optimized to achieve the best possible balance between quality and size. A quality rating for jpeg images is usually somewhere between 60 and 80, but it can depend entirely on the image, so it’s necessary to judge on a case-by-case basis.

Historically, to maintain perfect accessibility, it was necessary to optimize pages to fit inside page width as low as 640 pixels. Currently, most users have screens that are at least 1024 pixels wide, but in an environment where users are increasingly browsing from a variety of mobile devices, liquid layouts and device-specific style sheets are becoming necessary tricks of the trade.

Things to avoid

Frames
Using frames in a site is an SEO disaster and only functional in a limited sense.  Spiders can only index the first frame in a set and the hundreds of pages that may be within subsequent frames become utterly lost and invisible. Stay away from frames at all costs!

Flash splash pages
A flash splash page acts as a barrier between search engines and a site’s content. It’s far better, from almost every perspective, to skip the flash entirely and focus on your site’s content – besides, that’s why your users are there. When it comes down to it, most people won’t remember your intro animation; no matter how cute or funny you think it is, chances are that the only thing the average user experiences is annoyance that it took them longer to find what they were really looking for.

Table-based layouts
For the most part, table-based designs ruin the semantic purity of a website by confusing the relationship between content and layout. In the perfect website, removing all the design elements would leave a well-structured, linear document that would read something like a news article. Tables destroy this by unpredictably reorganizing the linear structure of content, sometimes making it completely nonsensical to search engines.