Designing with your users and the search engines in mind
Web Design is an extremely complicated process. The designer has to take into account aesthetics, user experience, usability, and the search engines’ concerns all at the same time. This can lead to conflicting priorities, but there are several tips web designers and web masters should keep in mind while designing their website.
Search Engine Friendly Web Design Tips
- Site ArchitectureIdeally, web designers will make sure that all pages should be within three clicks of the homepage. This not only ensures that the search engines will crawl and index all of the pages, but also makes information easily accessible to users who are likely to leave the site rather than dig for information that is not readily available.
- Fast Load Time Many web designers make the mistake of forgetting that not all users have internet connections as fast as theirs. They design media-rich websites that look great, forgetting that many of the movies or pictures they are adding won’t load quickly for someone with a slower connection. If a user has to wait for a flash movie to load to figure out what the page is about, they’ll likely leave before it has a chance to load. Flash movies and images should be used to augment quicker loading page elements like text, not replace them.
- Using Thumbnails Creating thumbnails for the images on your website will go a long way to decreasing the size of the page and the time it takes to load. There are many user-friendly ways to do this and it shouldn’t interfere with your viewer’s experience.
- Copy-centric Web Design Web design should center around that which is most useful to the user as well as to search engines: Copy. A web designer should take copy into consideration first when deciding how to fit other page elements into the website. By using CSS, web copy can be styled attractively so that it also adds to the aesthetic quality of the site.
- Adding Alt Text to Pictures Alt text is the text that (ideally) appears when you float your mouse over a picture. From a search engine’s point of view, it describes what the picture is since the spiders can’t actually view it. From a user’s perspective it says what the picture is, if it’s not clear at first glance. The Alt tag is also a good place to put key phrases that may seem awkward in plain text. However, do NOT use the Alt tag as a location in which to stuff unrelated keywords.
- Editorial Links Providing text that links to other pages in your website within the actual copy is an excellent idea, both from the search engines’ perspective and from the user’s. These links are referred to as “editorial” links because they were placed manually and appear somewhere other than the boilerplate navigation bars on the website. Search engines give them more credit and users find them handy when trying to find what they are looking for on the website.
Proper Web Design Examples
We are one of the only web design companies in Pittsburgh who build truly search engine friendly sites. Our own Portfolio Page is full of good examples of these web design optimization techniques. As we specialize in creating search engine friendly websites that are also user-friendly, we put our advice into practice on a daily basis. For more information on how we can help you develop high ranking websites, please contact us.