SEO Friendly Website Design

It is a common misconception that SEO should be implemented after a website is built. Although implementing SEO on a preexisting website is possible, it is much easier to be successful when your site is built on a proven SEO foundation. The best option is to consider SEO before you begin to build your website, if that is possible. If not, have no worries, you can still apply SEO strategies to the design of your site.

Ask yourself the following: Would you rather have the world’s most beautiful website or would you rather have a website that is attractive to the search engines and drives traffic? If you answered to the latter take heed of the following do’s and don’ts of website design. Note: these tips pertain to basic SEO practices. For more advice on effective website design in relation to the psychology of website design and converting visitors, visit our video tutorial on effective website design.

SEO Friendly Website Design Guidelines

First you need to check the website navigation and ensure all of the pages on the website are found and indexed by the targeted search engine. Add you site to Google’s index here:

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Avoid the use of Flash. Reason being is that search engines don’t index flash, it is worthless to them. When search engine spiders crawl your website they completely ignore flash. Flash should be avoided at all costs!

Avoid the use of Frames. Frames cause a plethora of website accessibility and usability problems and makes for lousy SEO. Frames make it difficult for search engine spiders to crawl through a website. Content inside frames is not indexable by the search engines, do so and your website may get this error message:

This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them.

Another very important website design practice for SEO is to use a CSS (cascading style sheet) navigational menu. By using CSS navigation, your navigational text will be crawl-able and indexable by the Search Engine Spiders.

Of significant importance is search engine friendly URLs, as they allow search engines to quickly identify what a web page is all about. It is also good practice to include keywords in the URL to increase visibility. A bad example would be:

http://www.example.com/products/10304&$%

Try this search engine friendly method instead:

http://www.example.com/products/tables/oak/dining-room-tables

The last thing is the images on your website; these can play a huge role in SEO. In addition to keeping the files as small as possible (size: 30-100kb, resolution: 72dpi) to achieve faster load times, also make sure to appropriately name them. For example, instead of naming an image “gh564.jpg” try instead to name it something keyword rich and descriptive like “oak-dining-room-table.jpg.” Image searches are popular and offer an additional way for your website to be found as well as indexed for the descriptions contained.

These are only a few examples of things that should be done when designing a website in order to maximize its SEO capabilities. Responsible design is the foundation to any SEO website, and can often be the reason that one site may rank over another.

For more info, check out this video tutorial: effective website design