August 19th, 2010 by Nick
The design stage offers an opportunity to create a site that’s going to allow for excellent search engine optimisation. It would be all too easy to think about outward appearance only when designing a site.
It used to be the case that a single page website was the thing to have. Get it up for users to look at and consider the job done. These days every enterprise is expected to have a sophisticated website that informs, entertains and promotes.
The purpose of publishing a website is to provide for the thousands of people who are searching for you without realising it. Unless you get your pages onto the results that appear after users have entered text into a query box, your site will languish in the dark recesses of the internet, unseen, unused and unloved.
Professional SEO services exist to give practical advise on improving a site so that it will get onto results pages. Implementing the advice often involves an overhaul of the entire site. Given the disruption this can cause, wouldn’t it be much better to think about SEO from the very beginning?
We’ve compiled four tips on how to design from an SEO perspective.
1. First, learn all you can about search engines and how they index sites. This is easier said than done, as big search engines like Google can be extremely secretive about the methods they use to determine relevance for listing. It can also get very technical when you consider that the search engines send specialist software to read sites and complicated algorithms to ‘crunch’ the data they return. It’s no wonder that so many publishers turn to a good SEO agency to make sure they’re not missing anything vital. It’s much easier to optimise a site that’s been created with SEO in mind, and to that end designers should be aware of basic facts about search engines. They should design sites, for example, that feature a good deal of text. Sites should be easy for both users AND search engine software to navigate. Some research about just how search engines work is invaluable from this perspective, whether or not you intend to delegate responsibility to SEO consultants.
2. Factor SEO into your job description. Since we’ve asserted that a site that doesn’t appear on results pages will not receive much traffic, when designing pages you need to think of it as your responsibility to get sites onto those results. When designing, it needs to be as if not more important than creating aesthetically pleasing pages. While it remains important to have a visually pleasing site, this need needs to be balanced with such factors as plentiful keyword-rich links, text files and ever changing content.
3. Think about remaining flexible. One of the key things about SEO is that the rules are always changing. In that sense, SEO is representative of e-commerce in general. For a site to succeed these days it needs to be robust in reacting to changes. From a good SEO point of view, design a site that can easily change to feature new pages, material etc. This involves such things as making sure that sitemaps automatically update, and links are regularly monitored for quality as they change.
4. Design with a specific target audience in mind. Users don’t browse the Internet in quite the same way as they do high streets. They’re likely to input very specific strings of keywords in order to reach you. The keyword phrases will have been conceived with a certain kind of destination in mind, and luring visitors to a site that’s irrelevant to their search in the hope that they’ll linger and become customers is spamming, and that’s had its day. Decide at the design stage how specific your site is going to be. To be optimal for results it needs to be very specific indeed, but that doesn’t prevent some sites from featuring more general content. A supplier of string might well feature an article on gardening, for example. When designing, take keywords into consideration at every stage of the game, and take the advice of SEO consultants to beware of spamming in any guise!
Factoring SEO into the process shouldn’t make a designer’s job less interesting. It should make it more challenging, since most needs for a site can be balanced with good optimisation. Flash can be used, if text files are provided too, for example. Get good advice from an SEO agency.
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