Web Design Tips and Tricks

Website Design – User or SEO Friendly? Find the Balance!

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Search engines robots (or spiders, crawlers) and “live” users see a Website in a different way, and sometimes it happens that your Website looks very user-friendly but it’s absolutely inappropriate for SE. If you start doing search engine optimization (SEO) for the Website you may find it to be a very hard and thankless task – the SEO-ed site looks boring and looses its charm and unique style. How to keep the balance? I will give you 5 tips that will help you to make your site friendly both for users and search engines.

Tip 1.

Text content

In SEO text content is the main factor and you must give it the best place on your home page. What is the best place? Remember how a spider follows the page – it starts from meta tags collecting necessary information about the page from content of tag head and then index the content of tag body. It has only few seconds to spider the code so the text content must be placed in the fist 1/3 of the code to be indexed well until the robot quits the page and follows its further way.

Usually HTML page has table structure and many Website designers like to place image banner in the header of the page, then horizontal or vertical menu comes, and only then text section appears. It’s wrong structure and it must be changed if you want your site to be SEO friendly.

I would recommend you this way:

If you use “horizontal” structure for your site:

1. Place all page content in the table.
2. In the first row of the table place 2-3 sentences of a text. The text must contain your main keywords but at the same time must be user friendly – readable, easy to understand and interesting. How to keep the balance? For example, your Website is about new and used cars, car dealers, and car spare parts. You can write “Welcome to your-site-name.com where you can find everything about cars, car dealers, and car spare parts” Make this text visible for users, i.e. don’t try to hide it playing with color of text and background or font size, using layers, styles, etc. – sooner or later you will be caught by search engines and penalized. Better aim all your efforts at making this piece of your home page nice and user friendly.
3. In the next row you can place image banner, Flash header, slide show, etc, i.e. graphical element that must attract attention of users.
4. In the next row you can place horizontal navigation bar (menu)
5. In the next row place main text content along with images, charts, boxes, etc.

If you use “vertical” structure for your site:

1. Place all page content in the table.
2. In the first left column of the table place 2-3 sentences of the user-friendly text with main keywords.
3. In the next column you can place logo, image, Flash slide show, etc.
4. Then you can place navigation bar, main text content, images, boxes, etc.

I have given you simple examples how to balance text content for users and robots. You can try your own options basing on the general idea.

Tip 2.

Images

Images at your Website are needed for users to attract their attention and give them better understanding of the site theme. However search engines also pay attention to images, namely to their names and tag alt.

So it’s rationally to name image of a car car.gif or car-spare-parts.jpeg than something like bfbfjdjdj.gif or 12345.jpeg. But don’t be over-diligent naming all of the images car.gif or car-dealers.jpeg. It will be considered as spamming! Use common sense and name images according to their content but with relation to your keywords. Also remember that Google Images and other similar search engines also index the images and show them in the search results, so keep the naming rational and appropriate and it will give good results to your Website.

The same thing is about using text in alt tag. Simple placing of all your keywords in alts of the images can only be considered as spamming and your site can be penalized. Use normal short phrases that will give users better understanding of what your site is about if they have difficulty with viewing images, and place your main keywords in the phrases. Make it look normal and rational. For example, you can use this text in alt for car.gif ”Click to know more about new and used cars from the best car dealers ”

Tip 3.

Title and description

Most users don’t pay attention to your Website title (shown in the title bar of browser) while visiting it. But they do when they search information in search engines and go through the search results – your site is shown there with its title and description by which users decide is it worth visiting. That’s why the title and description must reflect theme and content of your site 100% correctly and be understandable, catching, and promising for users.

But what’s about search engines? I think it is not secret that content of the tag title plays the greatest role when search engines sort your site among other search results. Having certain keywords in the title gives your site better position for these keywords. But it’s not correct to just place your keywords in the title using or even not using commas. It’s a kind of art to find balance between wish to be #1 in search engines and fear to be caught for spamming.

I would recommend you this tactics:

1. Check your keywords popularity at keywords selector tool, for example, at

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

2. Decide which keywords are main for your Website – this depends on how competitive a keyword is, i.e. how many sites appear in search results for this term. If competition is too high and you feel that you can’t devote all your efforts and money to climbing up in search results I would recommend you to select less competitive keywords to be main, otherwise it will be only wasting of your time, money, and efforts without visible results. If you think that you can afford fighting in this SEO game to win the first prize – top position in search engine, great, go ahead to start your promotion campaign – how exactly – it’s theme of another article.
3. When you have selected main keywords for your home page write it one under another in decreasing order of popularity. For our example it looks like (taken from Overture’s database for June 2005):

1479805 car new

1269118 car used

1041861 car part

371108 car dealer

292644 car sale

As you see, all these keywords start from “car” so it must be the first word in the title. Then “attach” there all other words in decreasing order of popularity but trying to keep the title readable, understandable, catching, and promising for users. Yes, I know, it’s not easy. You can even spend all the day thinking of this dilemma. But don’t give up and finally you will invent the best solution that will bring success to your site. So what we can use for our example:

“Car new & used, car part by dealer for sale”

You can see that Google, for example, shows and takes into account only the first 6-8 words of the title so there is no sense to make it longer.

Do the same thing for description – write 2-3 short sentences that fully describe your Website for users and contain your main keywords.

You may ask what to do with the rest keywords? Leave them in meta tags, add them to text content – they will play their role. Also you can optimize another site pages for these keywords – using them in the title, description, and so on.

Tip 4.

Link structure

If you define Google as the main search engine for your site you must know about Page Rank.

Important quote:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query “

Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/technology/

So the aim of your SEO it to make the link structure of your site getting high Page Rank for the home page. Practically, try to place only really important links (internal as well as external) at your home page and link to it from all other pages of your site.

However don’t forget to make other important sections of your site accessible from the home page because users will not waste their time finding page “Prices” or “Contact Us” browsing your entire Website. They will just quit it and go to another one. Make navigation menu linked to main and important pages of your site and create site map with link structure of the site where links to the rest site pages will be placed.

If you don’t give privilege to Google you can breathe with relief, however also try to follow the above-mentioned rule.

Tip 5.

Dynamic or static content?

For different sites different type of programming language is needed and it’s not correct to say which one type of content is better. Both.

For users there is no big difference between static and dynamic content except that the first looks more simple and easy, for example, sitename.com/new-cars-prices.html than the second one looks like sitename.com/index.php?cPath=33&osCsid=8e4a0606a249204c2a7a4162cf222e98

But there is another thing with search engines.

Important quote:

“Search engine robots follow standard links with slashes, but dynamic pages, generated from databases or content management systems, have dynamic URLs with question marks (?) and other command punctuation such as &, %, + and $…

…Some public search engines and most site and intranet search engines will index URLs with dynamic URLS, but others will not.

…The simplest solution is to generate static pages from your dynamic data and store them in the file system, linking to them using simple URLs. Site visitors and robots can access these files easily. This also removes a load from your back end database, as it does not have to gather content every time someone wants to view a page. This process is particularly appropriate for Websites or sections with archival data, such as journal back issues, old press releases, information on obsolete products, and so on.

For rapidly-changing information, such as news, product pages with inventory, special offers, or web conferencing, you should set up automatic conversion system. Most servers have a filter that can translate incoming URLs with slashes to internal URLs with question marks -- this is called URL rewriting.

For either system, you must make sure that of the rewritten pages has at least one incoming link. Search engine robots will follow these links, and index your page…”

Source: http://www.searchtools.com/robots/goodurls.html

So don’t be afraid to use dynamic content if you really need it but do necessary actions to make it accessible for indexing by robots.

As you can see, the tips are quite simple and rather give you general idea of what you should do or shouldn’t than explain you step-by-step “How-to-climb-the-top-of-search-engines”. All sites are unique and there is no universal solution. But your patience, attention, willing to learn and try will finally yield and bring your site success.

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