subject: Web Design Vs Search Engine Optimization [print this page] Web designers often ignore what goes into a search friendly design and cater only to their audience. However, search engine optimization (SEO) awareness has made designers look at what goes into making a design search friendly.SEO is a value added service that requires a continuous work and a search friendly web design only adds to this.
To understand how to make a web design search friendly let us understand first how search engines work. Search engines typically have spiders or crawlers that are automated program to crawl the web pages to read and collect the content and follow both the external and internal links. The information thus collected is deposited into the database called index. When visitors enter a particular keyword into the search box, the search engine brings forth the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in the database.
As a designer, if you do not take care about the on site optimization which is not design but provide useful and fresh content as also Meta data. Eye catching designs are for your visitors to stay and admire but the real SEO happens with relevant content. The latest Google algorithm Google Panda insists on content and content only. Web Designers often miss on the following:
A proper linking structure from home page
Crawler friendly home page
Target keywords on home page
Use flash menus that are attractive but cannot be seen by search engines
Embedding important keywords into flash cannot be seen by crawlers
Ajax content is not spiderable or indexable
Changing root locations causes loss in backlink counts and ranking
The read more as continuation is not crawler readable and should use keyword along with read more keyword
Using same anchor text everywhere is considered spam
Not having unique title and tag for every page with target keyword in it
Long blog titles are not search engine friendly
Stuffing the same keyword in title tags
Not describing Alt Attribute for images search engines cannot see images but read Alt Attribute
Unfriendly URLs remove crawlers from your site
Content is the most important factor after the first engaging look of the web design but over stuffing can also make your visitor get disinterested. Visitors enjoy fresh content and they can be retained on your pages by providing what is interesting to the readers. Retaining visitors contributes to your sites popularity and thus increases unique traffic.
