a
Go to content Go to navigation Go to search

The Ideal Web Designer Know a Lot About Search Engine Optimization

August 28th, 2006 by metapilot

I do a lot of optimization support for web design firms who have clients needing a dedicated search engine consultant. I love these jobs because I get to work with a lot good web designers and a lot of good clients that I probably wouldn’t have gotten to work with otherwise.Something I see more and more often in firms that have several designers is that there is a premium on those designers who have a keen eye for the designs, templates and techniques that assist search engine visibility. What’s most noticeable about them is that they don’t seem to stay in one place very long. It’s hard to blame them, it’s hard to turn down a pay raise and the opportunity to do what you really like doing at the same time.

Web site design and programming that is compatible with the efforts of the optimization specialist is highly prized today and the designer who specializes in search compatibility and likes partnering with algorithm specialists and SEO copywriters is like the holy grail. A site can sure move up to the top quickly when all the players are focused and determined to out rank the competitors.

Web Designers: When you’re commencing work on a site that will have a web site optimizer working on it–think CRAWLABILITY. This is the time to work on platform and navigaion. What will the spiders, which are just high-powered browsers with the JavaScript and images turned off, see? If you want to see what a page looks like to the spiders, take a peek at it through the SEO Browser–it can give you a whole new perspective on your web creations. Time spent thinking about these things early on is well spent because if you have to deal with them once the site goes live, you can count on it taking a lot longer and and you can count on having a lot more people breathing down your neck as you do it.

Templates

  • Most programming languages work fine with the search engines—HTML, XHTML, ASP, PHP,
  • Some programming languages and templates work against crawlability—
  • Flash: It just looks like a graphic to the search engines
  • JavaScript: Search engines have problems parsing it and understanding the linksrames: Creates disjointed pages, content and navigation.
  • Splash Pages: They need to have an HTML link to internal pages, at least. Content can be put further down on the page so that it can’t be seen.
  • Make sure you will have control over the Meta tags for each page.

    • On-Page Factors

  • Keep as much content towards the top of the page as possible
  • Move JavaScript and CSS off the page into their own files
  • Leave room for content
  • Paragraphs
  • Content boxes
  • Side bars
  • Think about space for headers—it’s always nice to have an H1 header at the top of the page.
  • Think about the layout of content and whether the page will scale well with a lot more content.
  • Be descriptive with page names—it helps

    • Navigation

  • Use absolute URLs in links rather than relative links
  • Anchor text is important—use keywords as the anchor text whenever possible
  • There is a risk when you use java. If you use it, make sure you can view the links in the HTML source code–and make the URLs absolute.
  • Always make HTML links somewhere on the page if you’re using JavaScript navigation.

    • Meta Tags

  • Title
  • One short sentence containing keywords for the page–keep it under 85 characters
  • Make each page title different for each page.
  • Description Tag
  • Three sentences containing main keywords and secondary keywords
  • Make sure it is place directly under the Title
  • Keywords
  • Not more than about ten of them. This tag is not used by any major search engine
  • Robots Tag
  • “robots” content=”index,follow” is the default of activity all bots so some sites use this tag and some choose not to.

    • For more info, check out our meta tag optimization service.

    Leave a Reply