Good Design for SEO

Designing for search engines and for humans is a starting point for good design practices. Here we look at some of the basic considerations.

Flash.
Flash has been popular for a number of years and has its place in website design: It has great visual impact, if done properly, and can set a good friendly tone to the website visitor. It's also a great way of showing many products or services in a small area.

From an SEO perspective you need to know that flash content cannot be read by a search engine as the search engine cannot read the text or the images contained within it.

Our recommendation on flash would be that you do not make your whole website flash. If you are designing a new website use it sparingly in high impact areas to capture the attention of your intended audience.

Frames.
Early, and many diy, websites are designed with frames. Frames are where the main home page is actually a frameset page that includes several other pages into it. Frames make it easy to construct templates that have fixed headers and menus but, from a search engine perspective, frames make the page hard to index in search engines and should be avoided.

Page Layout.
Webmasters believe that Google spiders trawls web pages from left to right and top to bottom - just as you'd read a page of text. Given this it would make sense that the most valuable keywords and information be published on the left and near the top of a page - aesthetic design permitting, of course. Bear this in mind during the design stage and you'll be making is easier for humand and search engine spiders to read you page content.

Good HTML Coding.
All html editors (Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc) generate html page coding that is significantly larger than it needs to be. Good html coding keeps redundant code to a minimum, does not unneccessarily duplicate code and therefore maintains a good copy-to-code ratio on the page - and therefore making it easier for pages to be spidered. If you're serious about SEO, get a professional developer to help you code a page correctly.

Image Sizes.
Basically, keep all images as small as possible and use only what you need to. This is essential for decreasing page loading times and getting information onto the users screen as soon as possible.

Page size and loading times.
Keeping the page size as small as possible speeds up page loading times for the site visitor and significantly increases your chances of keeping them on-site. Google, and other search engines, do not like to scan huge files so keeping your overall page size below 25k and loading times below 8 seconds is a good guide.

Screen Size.
Some recent stats on screen size settings are:
1024x768 resolution - 65%.
800x600 resolution - 13%,
with 20% running at larger sizes and 2% are unknown.

Screen size settings should influence the way you design and we recommend designing for the smallest visitor settings. In practice, this will be the 800x600 setting or, in some cases, where the site has a large amount of information to convey a 1000x620 setting.

Colors and Themes.
Although not stricly SEO, colour is one of the most important aspects of page design and colour sets the the theme, style and message for the site. Think about your target audience; demographics, sex and geographics and be mindful of the messages that certain colours sub-conciously imply to people. Colour is a very important factor in the end goal of what SEO is trying to achieve - more buying customers through your websit.

Browser.
It is critical that your web page works in with Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Opera and Safari. Testing other browsers is also an advantage but these are the main ones in use. Designing sites for W3C cross browser compliance is a great starting point but we further recommend manually checking browser and browser variants to ensure that your target customers will be able to see your site as you intend them to.

Thinking through design objectives at the start of a project will not only help speed up the develpment process but will also help in achieving objectives fro SEO. The two disciplines should be seen as complimentary rather than conflicting.

 

 

 


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