The Essentiality of a Search Engine Friendly Website Design

Many web site owners tend to think about search engine marketing as an afterthought. They create a site design first, and then think that the site can miraculously appear at the top of search engine results without considering how the search engines and directory editors will treat the site. All too often, those site owners are in for a rude awakening. One reason why at iConceptua's Search Engine Positioning services we recommend site owners to plan thier budgets in a way so to include Search Engine Positioning for their websites before hand.

Too many web site designers focus on fancy workarounds or try to trick the search engine spiders. In reality, simplifying everything on your site (design, scripts, style sheets, URLs) from the very beginning of the design stage will get you the best initial results.

The Five Rules of Web Design

Users prefer sites that follow five rules of web design, which are as follows

All of these above design principles are interrelated and no one design principle is effective without the others.

For example, a site might rank well in the search engines, but the download time of the destination page might irritate your site visitors. This is particularly true of web sites designed in Flash or sites with splash pages. Don't forget the underlying point that when people come to your web site, they don't necessarily want to see a gigantic Flash animation. They want to see information about the keywords they typed into a search query.

Once the design template is established, there are three items designers should keep in mind: visible text, navigation scheme, and link popularity. All search engines index visible text. This is something all of the search engines have in common. This is a fact about search engines that will not change, therefore, always put text on the pages you want to show up well in the search engines.

The most important text on your pages is the text in your title tags, and the visible body text. Text that is at the top of a page, in the first screen your target audience views is the most important text on that page. Text that is not visible, such as Meta tag text and alternative text, is not as important as many people think.

When it comes to web copywriting, learn to write copy using the words that your target audience will type into search queries.

Site navigation, is equally as important as keyword selection and placement. Search engines should be able to spider important sections of your site; so that they know the content exists. And your site visitors might not necessarily land on the page that contains the information they are searching for. Your site's navigation scheme should help them get to their final destination and, hopefully, encourage them to take an action (placing an order, subscribing, etc.).

Hiring a search engine optimization consultant early in the design stages can save your company thousands of dollars in time and expenses. A consultant can tell you if the design team is making a fundamental mistake in the initial design templates. For example, there is no such thing as a 100% search engine friendly JavaScript rollover. So something as simple as including text links on pages will help.

The last element of an effective search engine friendly design involves your site visitors. Link popularity, which is the number and quality of links to your site, can determine your site's search engine visibility. That's where the rules of web design come into play. People tend to link to sites that they find easy to use and easy to comprehend.

Summarizing the importance of creating search engine friendly sites, we can summarize that the responsibility of marketing a web site falls on the site owner, not the search engines and directories. A search engine's job is to deliver relevant results to their target audience. So if you help the search engines do their job by giving them keyword-rich text, a navigation scheme they can easily spider, and quality content that other sites link to, you are helping the search engines. And likewise, the search engines can help you.