SEO and Site Design | One Uproar

This article is based on ?Ranking #1: 50 Essential Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results? written by James Beswick and published by One Uproar.

A website is a collection of web pages and although Google ranks individual pages rather than entire sites, how these pages are interconnected and managed has an impact on SEO. Many of the tips are common sense from the perspective of making the visitor experience as good as possible, but the vast majority are not implemented by a surprising number of sites.

Checking the load time of your site

The basic problem is that slow sites drive visitors away, and since there?s no guarantee how fast a visitor?s connection will be, it pays to optimize your web pages to make them as small as possible. There are range of tools that can help you do this.

Patience is not a virtue on web pages. In fact, pages that load slowly drive visitors away, so test your site using free tools to find potential bottlenecks.

One frequently overlooked factor is that users have different ways to connect to the Internet, all of which have different speeds. If Internet connectivity is like the water supply, a T1 corporate connection is like a water main coming into the building, whereas dial-up can be like more like a shower with no pressure. Just because your connection is fast, don?t assume your visitors experience anything like the same speed.

Using tools such as WebSiteOptimization.com?s Analyzer?or Pingdom?s speed test page, you can test your site for pages that are slow to load. This tool will examine a web page?s assets (HTML, CSS, image and media files) and provide a ?Good vs. Bad? summary together with recommendations for improving speed. It?s also always worth reading?Google?s advice on improving pageload time.

Validating your web pages

Browsers work on standards-based languages, so you should validate your web pages to ensure compatibility across the broadest range of browsers.

There are rules defining how HTML is used ? if your site has poorly formed code, it may hinder the attempts of search engines to read and understand it.

Unlike a Word document or PDF, there?s no concept of a fixed or accepted version of a webpage, which will change its appearance depending on operating system, browser type, browser version, installed fonts and user preferences. Good code can help bridge these differences and make a page look broadly the same all the way from Chrome on a Netbook to Safari on a Mac.

Search engine spiders and browsers are surprisingly resilient at reading bad code and making it work, but any errors become visible when comparing the same website in different browsers. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for defining the standards behind HTML, and major browser developers such as Microsoft, Mozilla and Google adhere to these standards to ensure sites appear the same across browsers (and operating systems).

Avoid Flash, frames ? and Ajax

100% Flash sites are inherently bad for on-page SEO. Frames-based sites are also not search-engine friendly, but thankfully seem to be going out of fashion. Learn why Flash, frames and even Ajax are problematic for search engine spiders.

Flash brings real interactivity and media to websites. Unfortunately, it brings headaches for SEO since search engines can?t see it.

This topic surfaces repeatedly in the SEO community, but it?s still surprising to see how companies will invest $100,000 in a Flash website with the express intention of improving their search engine ranking. There are some really innovative Flash sites out there demonstrating real creativity, but while they will often be more interactive and, well, ?Flash? than traditional HTML/CSS sites, they will always rank lower in SERPs.

100% Flash websites don?t rank well in search engines.

The text and images of a Flash object are stored as a binary format so the animation you see in the final rendered version doesn?t exist as ?readable? text in the containing HTML or FLV files. While Google and Adobe have both been getting better at making Flash movies more searchable, it?s still the case that Flash sites rank poorly by comparison for 2 key reasons:

• Google?s sophistication of looking beyond keywords to understand context is lost in metadata used to describe the movie content. A 100% Flash site may contain dozens of page with visible text content, but this will be summarized as a handful of keywords at the file level. In many cases, designers don?t include the metadata at all.
• Great designers often don?t know much about SEO (sorry, but it?s true). In the book?s example, screen-captured from an unnamed 100% Flash site, the TITLE attribute is the default value ?Intro?, and it?s missing a META DESCRIPTION. A search engine has no chance of understanding that this site is for a national bar chain specializing in jazz and martinis.

At its most basic level, SEO is largely a text-driven business and robots can?t read images and Flash well. Most Flash sites don?t integrate well with Google Analytics (which is possible, but rarely done), making it difficult to collect metrics on where users are clicking and what pages within the site are the most popular. It?s also not possible to bookmark individual pages so the entry point into the site is always the same.

Use a CMS and add a blog

Content management systems take the heavy-lifting out of website design and content management, but also can be good for search engine optimization. WordPress can be used to add a blog to your site ? find out why blogs can have a transformative effect on your search engine rankings.

A good CMS will manage your layout, content, databases and user interaction ? if you are building a new site in 2010 and beyond, chances are you need a CMS.

SEO is about content ? not just any old content, but changing and dynamic content that is timely and relevant. This means that the old days of 5-page static websites simply don?t rank well anymore (unless they?re for very niche, uncompetitive keyword phrases), and you need to be able to create, delete and update pages regularly without going back to your web designer.

There?s no easier way to do this than using a Content Management System, such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla (there are many others but these are all free and well supported). The CMS acts as a container for everything on your site, and manages much of the mundane housekeeping that otherwise you would have to deal with. By and large, CMS-driven sites are inherently friendly to search engines and handle the technical side of serving pages, and ? not surprisingly ? managing content.

There are web design companies who shy away from these technologies because they simplify the web design process (resulting in less work!) but don?t be discouraged ? just because it reduces their fees doesn?t make it bad choice for your website. And in choosing a CMS, you?re keeping good company: content-rich sites such as CNN, the New York Times, WSJ.com and MTV.com are all based upon CMS platforms (WordPress in these cases). These off-the-shelf solutions will handle your site more easily and effectively than a platform you build from scratch.

Navigation and sitemap

Visitors are turned off by poor navigation, but search engine spiders often can?t find (and therefore index) orphaned pages. Learn the tips to ensure ?your site?s navigation is logical to visitors and search engine-friendly.

Good site design starts with the end user in mind and a good user experience directly translates to a good reputation in search engines.

Poor navigation is one of the major reasons that visitors leave sites and pages don?t get indexed.?How many times have you been on a website and not been able to find pages that you thought should be obvious? Websites by their very nature are a collection of pages linked together by a navigation system and when that system is poorly designed, it?s much like a road system with poor signs and unexpected turns ? the visitor (or driver) ends up in the wrong place, misses their turn and gets frustrated. Web usability author Steve Krug puts it elegantly in his book titled Don?t Make Me Think when he observes that poor navigation makes us stop and think, whereas well designed navigation is almost invisible.

Examples of poor navigation are not hard to find and while it?s relatively rare to see bad navigation built to a brand new site, it seems to develop and deteriorate as more content and pages are added without any thought to the overall page-to-page linking. Frustration is a major reason why users give up on websites, so it?s essential to maintain obvious navigation even as your site gets larger.

Website owners often imagine that everyone will be coming in through the front door ? otherwise known as the home page (e.g. http://mysite.com) ? but site statistics tend to prove otherwise. While the bulk of your traffic will point to the top-level domain when the site is first launched, as you gather more inbound links and increase your online reputation, a growing percentage of hits will be targeted to individual pages nested in your site.

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