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
