Designing with SEO in Mind

Posted November 2nd 2012 Blog - 0 Comments

There is more to building a great website today than just making it look good. While first impressions are key and having a site that looks great is very important, you also want to be sure you design the site with SEO in mind from the start. If not, going back to make changes and edits will require additional work. When your website is designed with SEO in the forefront from the very beginning of the project, you’re saving time and money and ensuring good ranking in search results.

SEO is not just for Internet marketers. Anyone with a blog or website needs to have proper SEO in place in order to get the most from their site. What good does it do to build an awesome site if no one can ever find it?

Here are some things to know about web site design with SEO in mind:

Skip the Splash Page: While some people still think they look fancy, they do nothing for your SEO and can actually hurt your rankings since search engine spiders use your index page to gather information needed to rank the site. If yours is a splash page, it’s going to prevent them from getting information they need to index your site properly.

Keep Your Code Clean: Keep your code as simple and streamlined as possible. Use filenames that make sense and that relate to what the file actually is. Not only will this help you if you ever need to do editing to the site, it also helps the search bots read your site and understand what it’s all about. Be sure to use keywords in your “alt” tags for images on the site.

Design for Text Instead of Images: It’s natural as a designer to think about building the site for aesthetics. You want it to look good and you want to create something you can be proud to show off. While the visual appeal is important, you must design with the text in mind. This is why designers use Lorem ipsum as filler text if they do not have the website copy yet while they are designing the website. This is because your site can turn out looking a lot different once you plug in the content.

When the design of the site is not optimized for the search engines, it will hinder any SEO progress you have with your search optimizing tactics. Understanding how SEO works will be very helpful to the creation process and the sad fact is that many web designers today don’t fully understand SEO, although the two go hand in hand.

Search engines such as Google, send out bots often called “web spiders” that are automatically programmed to read websites and pages on the web and sort and organize them according to the information found on them. This information is stored in a large database and is used when Internet browsers type a search term in the search engine to help the user find sites that relate to what they are looking for. SEO refers to the steps you take to build relevancy in your topic. For example, if your website is about “bathing cats”, you want to be optimized for this and similar phrases related to bathing cats. This way, when a user types “How to bathe a cat” in their search engine, they have a higher chance of finding your site in the top of the search results.

There is a lot involved in search engine optimized design and this is just the beginning. What are some things you consider essential to SEO web design?