subject: Designing Your Web Site With Seo In Mind [print this page] When people discuss Web site design, even design in general, they tend to think it focuses on page layout, color, animations and other aesthetic matters. These are part of the formula, of course, a big part. It helps to think of designing as being, more broadly, the process of strategizing, because as important as the look and feel of the site is its usefulness in capturing business by converting visitors into customers (assuming it's a commercial enterprise). When you are designing your Web site with SEO in mind, you are looking at the big picture, not just the aesthetics.
It is crucial in a competitive market (and a recessionary one) to understand how your site's overall architecture can make it more or less visible to search engines, and more or less empowered to rise in page rankings and other measurable results. There are numerous elements to your pages and site that can either interfere with or help the various search engines crawl through your site (like a spider, hence the term). Some elements can help and hinder you at the same time. Your navigation scheme and design technologies like Cascading Style Scripts (CSS) are two good examples.
Basic building blocks
It is still true, but perhaps not quite as true as it was a few years ago, that the most important pages of your site are closest to the root directory. The most common design (rather, architectural) recommendation here is to locate the home page, normally called index.html, in this area, as well as the REP robots.txt document (Robots Exclusion Protocol).
Among the myths in the Web world is that the search bots ignore everything below the third or fourth subdirectory. If this ever was the case, it is not today, because the spiders will now continue crawling as long as you have related pages linked the right way (the spider-friendly way). To aid in this effort, you are counseled by some experts to locate as many as 200 of your most important pages, if you even have that number, at the root. The recommendation refers to pages that are deemed important not by your IT department, or even some so-called SEO expert, but by your target audience. (A real SEO expert will likely know this, of course.)
Mapping and names
The navigation scheme for your site is a key element, naturally. Pull-down menus and rollover schemes are not as friendly and simple to use as buttons, but neither are as effective overall as good old hypertext links. It takes differing amounts of time to render the various navigation schemes, which favors the latter method, but the bottom line for you decision should be, once again, the preferences of your site visitors and target demographic. (On a side note, this is among the most important reasons that you should be trying to understand, quantify and qualify who those visitors and potential visitors are.)
Files names, directories and URLs are also important to strategize correctly. When users in an online poll were given a choice of two URLs, domain.com/carseats.html or domain.com/car/seats.html, over 90% chose the shorter one without the subdirectory. Having too many forward slashes (trivia: the actual word for a forward slash is virgule) in URLs is a common gripe that webmasters hear when they actually bother to get users' feedback.
Page types
The professionals in this industry that focus on usability talk about specific types of pages, although some say there are seven, some say 11, some say more. The actual number is less critical than the underlying point, which is that SEO strategies need to deal with these different sorts of page layouts and architectures. The kind of page you are attempting to conceive, build and deploy should strongly affect the way you go about the tasks.
There are category/gallery pages, home pages, various landing pages, shopping cart pages and so on. You certainly would not optimize your shopping cart page the same way you would your home page, as this runs afoul of the need to craft not just the design/architecture but the all-important content on the pages. For example, the actions you are trying to get the visitors to take are entirely different for different page types. One page strategy may be to persuade, while another is to issue what is termed a call to action, most often related to sales. Do not mix your messages.
Bottom line
Good and effective site design involves issues of design, color, language, layout and the term that Apple made famous with its graphic interface, look and feel. Your strategy must be workable in the real world, today, while allowing creative flexibility and fine-tuning in the future. The bottom line is to increase your site conversions, right? If you just stay focused on what will work for the visitor rather than what is easiest to do, you will like the results. Good design on the Web is part art and part science, so get both hemispheres of your brain spinning and get to it.
