Does your Web Designer Know SEO?

Web designers want to create memorable, appealing sites. If your site is dependent upon the search engines then your web designer needs to take several things into consideration when they are designing a site.

My company does both Internet marketing and web design. I’m in the midst of bidding on a very big project because the potential client was looking for good web design, but also wanted help with her marketing.

Search engines are stupid. They can’t read graphics like we humans. So if your site is all graphic then they don’t know what your site is about, even if you have META tags that describe your site.

The search engines want to return the most relevant results back to the visitors so your page needs to have a theme to it. This starts with your META tags and then is fleshed out in the content of the page, including the on-page title that is placed within an H1 tag.

Keyword Prominence

Don’t put a ton of code that the search engines can’t get to the content. Search engines need content. With one site we were working on, the content started on line 673 and the search engines returned back the code “Supplemental Pages” which means the search engines know that the pages exist but don’t have content for the page.

We recently made some changes on a client’s major pages where we cleaned up the code. After we were done, the content started on line 112 instead of somewhere around 450. The client saw more traffic from the search engines that he’d ever seen before.

Readable by the Search Engines

The search engines need actual text to grab onto and put in their database. Therefore, the site cannot be all images nor can it be all Flash. It doesn’t hurt to have some portions of the page in Flash, but you need to recognize the search engines can’t read the words in the Flash. Also, designers tend to put the on-page title in graphics. Again, the search engines can’t read this so it needs to be in text. Your designer can use CSS to add some design elements to the on-page title.

We had a client who originally was going to have a mixture of Flash and text on their site. As we moved through the design of the site, our client contact wanted to have it all Flash. A year later the client came back to us because he wanted to show up more prominently within the search engines and nothing was happening because the search engines couldn’t read the words on the page. We are in the process of building a sub-site that is all HTML, which will help them on the search engines.

Using ALT Tags

ALT tags were initially created for the visually impaired. Putting keywords into the ALT tag was a part of SEO for several years before falling out of favor because of abuse. From what we’ve seen, putting keywords into the ALT seems to be making a comeback when done correctly. The descriptions in the ALT tags should reflect what is on the page and in the picture. Don’t put a ton of keywords into the ALT tag, just enough to describe the picture.

Text Links

When I evaluate a web site in regard to SEO, one of the first things I do is check to see what if there are text links on the page. They’re not prettiest things in the world but necessary especially with the Site Map from the home page. need to create this on every page. important for internal linking. The search engines see the pages on the site as individual sites. Also an aid for visitors to find what they need, not just of SEO . create internal links, good for SEO.

Using CSS to Place Content

Using CSS can help put the content where you want it to go. Can actually have the content in a higher place than the navigation of the site. can also take out a lot of the code that is created when you use tables in HTML. The search engines don’t have to wend their way through all the HTML.

Using Javascript Includes

This is one line of code that calls in a bunch of other code, usually with navigation that is often at the top of web sites. The search engines don’t read the extra code so it only sees one line, even though there might be 100 lines of code for the navigation. Can use this for other things that might be in the left navigation, such as newsletter sign ups, advertisements, etc.

Dave Carlson owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm in Denver, Colo., specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and web site design/redesign. Call 720-922-3124 or visit his web site at http://www.GreenChair.net.