Designing a Website

Avoiding Some Common Designer (Design) Mistakes for Improved Optimization

After I initially designed my website, I thought this would be a good time to touch on designing a search engine friendly site. This is a very important stage, and its important that your newly built website will not need to have any major changes just to make it search engine friendly.

Before I started working in the search marketing industry back in April 2000, I have designed a few sites, for myself, for friends and for businesses. In the beginning, I fell for the same trap that most web designers do. The splash pages and framed websites. To a web designer, a splash page this gives them a chance to display their artistic and creative abilities. From a search marketing point of view, it is easy to see the big picture and notice that having a splash page with huge graphics and flash with very little or no content is not going to help the site achieve great marketing success on the internet. But from a web design view, having a splash page looks visually appealing and often the client is very happy with it.

The Problems with Splash Pages

The problem with splash pages is that it provides hardly any content for the users or the search engines, and there is usually only one link/path into the entire site. So, the users and search engine spiders have to make an addition click (sometimes two clicks or more) to get to the actual content. The more clicks a user has to make in order to get to the goods that you want them to see, the more likely they will go back to the search results page and continue on to the next site.

Search engines generally consider the main page (ie default/index for example) to be the most important page on your site. We always want to use this to our advantage. So, if you have a splash page on your site, it would be highly advised that you have this updated and have the actual page that you want your visitors to see (the actual content) when they come to your site.

Search Engine Friendly Websites

Ideally, you want the very first page on your site to have all the info that the user and search engines will need. That includes a proper navigation and content.

So, for marketing your business online. You still want to have a visually appealing website, but you also want it to be search engine friendly. Having the best of both worlds will provide to be a great asset to helping your online business succeed in today's competitive market. You want your site to instill confidence to your potential customer. Its important to have a site that makes your potential customer want to buy from you.

Using Flash

It is still ok to use flash on your site, but not have your entire site done in flash. If you do have your site entirely done in flash, you will want to have a HTML version done up ASAP! Don't forget people that are on dialup, and people that don't have the flash plug-in installed, there's a good chance they'll click the back button and leave your site.

As always moderation is the key. This goes with graphics as well. We do not want to have the site too heavy in graphics. You still have to consider that a large number of people are still using dialup connection and we do not want to have a site that loads slowly. Having this happen can result in the visitor hit the back button and continue on the the next site.

Drop Down Menus

Search engine spiders cannot follow the links in drop down menus. So if you do have drop down menus on your site, you will need to incorporate some text links on your site to make sure that the search engines can fully index your site.

Avoid Using Frames if Possible

If at all possible, try to avoid using frames when building out your site. Typically what happens is the sub-page with the content is the one that starts to ranking and get traffic, and they are left without the navigation on the other frames pages.

Always Get Advice

Lets say you found a web designer that you like, it is still a very good idea to hire a search marketing consultant/company to help you along with the process. The majority of search marketing firms will gladly consult you through the development of your site (there'll usually be a fee involved). Making sure that your site is search engine friendly from the get go, will save you money and time.

 

Test It Out! See how your Splash or Frames page looks to the Search Engines Lynx Viewer - use this program to spider your splash or frames page to see what the search engines will see. Generally we like the search engines to spider content, and with splash or frames pages, this poses a problem, but the good news is that it is generally an easy fix!

The next article will touch on Content Development.

Gerard Manning
Canadian Search Engine Marketing :: Manning Search Marketing