Basic Rules of Optimised Web Site Design

Optimized Web Site Design

Last updated: 27 Sep 2006

Michael Briggs. 7th October 2004.

Often when speaking to customers who already have great looking sites I am amazed by how design has overridden Search Engine friendliness and usability. This is often exacerbated by what we know as the 'mushroom syndrome'. This is where clients have been kept in the dark and fed a diet of horse manure. Often it is a pure lack of understanding on the part of web designers of the underlying issues of optimized Web Site design.

Basic Issues relating to optimized web site design.

Framesets and IFrames: A definite mistake when designing an optimised web site to rank in the search engine indices is the use of framesets. These obscure any content which Google will use to attach relevancy to the pages of any site. The Spiders used by Google reads code not the onscreen content displayed by a browser. An optimised web site should have a textual component which will aid the spider in giving your site relevancy. If you have a look at these Google results and view the source you will find that the code is only a basic head and a Frameset body. Framesets are used by web designers as a means to minimise user download time and preserve a navigation.

Synchronicity: Meta tags and content should be consistent and synchronous throughout a web site page, an optimised web site design relies on not only what can be seen but what cannot. Meta tags and title tags are central to an effectively optimized website. Meta Tags should be targeted to a few keyphrases that you wish the page to be seen as important for. A web site which has been designed using text synchronous optimized design methods can rank higher than sites with significantly greater Google Page Rank.

Error Free HTML: W3, the internet standards agency, have a free online html and xml validation service. This ensures that coding errors can be avoided easily. Often this is overlooked by website designers as browsers have the ability to intuit bad coding. Search Engine Spiders do not have this ability. So if you are designing an optimised site to rank well, coding errors are an issue. A coding error can result in a spider being unable to read the rest of that line of code, this causes the optimised content to not be read.

Flash Sites: These sites are not only not optimised web sites they fall outside the legal requirements regarding users who have a disability. Flash files contain no spiderable textual component and as such can pass no keyword relevancy over to the search engine. Flash can be a fantastic asset to an optimised site when used as customer focused tool. It can grab the viewer and direct them towards the content rich optimised web site. Good examples of integrated flash use in optimized website design can be found at A1man and ITlab Sites that are wholly designed in flash also are discriminatory. They can not pass anything to site readers, such as Jaws, and in essence block the disabled users access to your site. Under disability discrimination legislation in the UK this is illegal.

At Oyster Web we are more than willing to aid your web designer in the design methodology so you can build an optimised web site in house. A Link to our optimised web site design / redesign is provided below.

If you are interested in having optimized web site design methods applied to your website simply contact us.

Search Engine Friendly design and Redesign Consultancy

Related Content
Free Search Engine Positioning Report