All web designers face a challenge when selling their services, most designers will choose look and feel, fancy designs and images over good usability and making sure its search engine friendly, it’s all very well have a great brochure but if no one will ever read it it’s a dead cause from the start!
Search engines need to be able to crawl your websites pages to understand what the site is about, here is a little guide to make sure your website looks good and can still rank in Google.
Avoid gateway pages
Many designers like to put a fancy page on the main URL leading through to the site, this will usually mean the home page is just an image with a little button or a link saying click here to view the site, this means the most powerful page on your site will contain very little content and push category pages or information down to a lower level making it impossible for Google to index. In worst cases this will be a flash based page and Google will not even be able to read the link and view the site.
Keep away from Ajax applications
Ajax technology was designed to look good and give flashy dynamic displays, sadly this is again not readable by Google ensuring all your hard work creating good useful content will go to waste, also Ajax will usually slow down the load rate making sure you have a high bounce rate and giving you a low SEO quality score.
Make sure all your URL’s are Google friendly
Making sure your site is tidy gives a great first impression to Google, having URL strings saying www.home.com/index?id -093744 is a no, this not only looks very unprofessional to your users but Google will not be able to attribute much power to the page, make sure all development means your pages will be static with a
www.home.com/greatnewproduct.aspx, Always use search engine friendly URL’s.
On-site content structure
Google loves content, making sure your site has the ability to place good relevant content on each of your pages helps your site tell Google what you are about, however, this does mean you should just stuff any old information in there, make it useful, relevant and engaging.
News and blogs
Keeping your site up to date with new, helpful and relevant information will help Google understand you are always trying to give help and engage your visitors, this shows you are an active site and always keeping up to date and refreshed, your developer will need to make sure you have the ability to keep your site up to date.
In Summary
Of course good design and pretty pictures matter but make sure your site is search engine friendly or it’s a dud from day one!
For more information about
Good SEO web design, contact our team via the form on our contact page and we shall be in touch.