10 principles of search engine friendly web design

What is ‘Search Engine Friendly’ web design?

Search engine friendly web design is web design that is planned around known search engine optimization principles. If ranking well in the search engines is important to you then the first step towards this goal should be a search engine friendly web design. Fortunately, search engines like much the same things that users do - great content, clean layouts, easy navigation - so it’s well worth the time it takes to carefully plan your website page by page.

A ‘Search Engine Friendly’ website is one that search engines can easily scan and understand; it allows search engines to easily jump from page to page of the website, read content, determine what keywords are relevant, and then deliver search results accordingly. Although there are other factors that will affect the search engine success of a website (in particular, link popularity) - search engine friendly web design is a very important element of search engine optimisation.

Some of the points below contain some technical details that your web developer should be able to take care of for you.

How to achieve a search engine friendly web design:

1. Well structured and keyword rich content
   As you’ve probably heard time and time again, content is king. There’s nothing more important than content. Just like users, search engines like useful heading tags, bullet points, highlighted words and keyword rich content. Here are some tips to writing good web copy.
2. Make sure all title tags are unique
   Title tags should uniquely identify the content on any given page - title tags give search engines the first clue as to what a page is about. With ecommerce websites, every single product page should have a unique title tag, it can make a big difference to ranking well for individual product names (ask your web developer to have these generated automatically for you based on the product and category names).
3. Avoid keyword cannibalization
   Following on from the 2 points above, when structuring content make sure you target different keyword combinations on each page. Keyword cannilbalization is when the same keywords are targeted on many different pages of a website. This dilutes the value of the keywords on any one page and makes it harder for search engines to decide which page to display in search results.
4. Update often
   It’s worthwhile investing in a CMS (content management system) or asking your web developer to setup a blog for you (WordPress is fantastic, and free!). There are many of benefits to updating your content often, including:
   • Keyword Count
     It boosts your keyword count and the potential for getting found via web searches for an ever increasing number of keyword combinations (long tail searches: search phrases that are typically longer and more specific than normal)
   • Natural way of building links
     Every time you add relevant content to your website you increase the likelihood that other websites will link to yours, thereby increaseing your link popularity. There is nothing more powerful from a search engine optimisation perspective than incoming links, particularly if they come from relevant and/or valuable sources. Why not get involved in some related forums and other social media avenues (facebook, twitter etc) and announce to your audience each time you release new content along with a link straight to it!
   • Search engines will pay regular visits
     The more often you update, the more often search engines will visit your website to check for new and upated content.
5. Clean layouts work best
   The cleaner the coding of your website, the easier it is for search engines to access the website content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for design implementation and all scripts should be contained within external files.
6. Easy navigation
   Navigation should be obvious (near the top of the page) and clean (avoid flash menus or javascript for hover effects, use css instead). Search engines (as well as website visitors) need to be able to easily navigate from page to page of your website. If your website has a lot of deeper level pages then make sure you setup a sitemap and link to this from your home page so so that search engines can them.
7. Meaningful directory and file names
   Something like: www.clothes.com/jeans/levis/ is a lot more meaningful to search engines than www.clothes.com/index.php?cat=10&subcat=12. Your keywords should be included in directory and file names wherever possible.
8. Avoid the excessive use of FLASH.
   There are many obstacles to achieving search engine friendliness in Flash websites, so use it sparingly. Flash can be great for creating some eye-catching ads or dynamic flair to your website but should not be heavily used.
9. Avoid embedding text in images
   Search engines can’t read text that appears in an image - so you’re better off displaying your content in real text wherever possible. When it is necessary to embed text in images then ALT tags can be used to describe the content to search engines
10. Link to your domain, not index.html (.asp, .php etc)
    Every-time you display a link to your home page, you should link to your full domain, not the file name. The number of pages linking to your home page (both external and internal) is an imporant element of seo, you don’t want to divide the total number of incoming links to your home page between 2 different links! You can read more about link popularity here.

Tags: search engine friendly

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