Top 4 SEO-Friendly Web Design Tips
- Navigation Links
After planning the information structure of your site you should have some key categories in mind for the main navigation and some sub navigations to go under each.
Quiet often I see sites that do not have a landing page for their main categories but instead choosing to jump straight to a sub category. E.g. a confectionary company has “chocolate” as a main category link and “Cadbury” as a sub-category ensure that both “chocolate” and “Cadbury” has its own page and not shared that way each page can attempt to rank for its own content.
- The 3 click rule
The general gist of the rule is to avoid having a structure that requires users to make more than 3 clicks to find your content, users naturally have a short attention span and if most of their time is spent trying to find what they are looking for on your site with confusing or overly long navigation chances are they will leave your site.
- Allow room for textual content
Pages that are designed to showcase pictures of products should also allow room for a small textual description where possible.
Ensure that key images have an alt attribute defined, search engines are text crawlers and have no visual interpretation abilities so a picture of a donut is just the same as a picture of a cookie if no alt attribute describing the image is used. This is especially useful to differentiate pages have little textual from hundreds of other pages that share the same design template.
Example: img alt="chocolate_donut" src="http://www.abc.com.au/content/upload/images/donut.jpg"
- Ensure crawlability
Do not use iframes to serve your content as search engines cannot read what is contained within. Opt for creating the content on separate pages instead of using iframes to dynamically populate pages.
Use flash sparingly, search engines are improving in their ability to crawl content within flash (loaded through xml) but is still second-rate compared to plain HTML link and content.
Flash should always be considered as a visual addition and not the driving force behind the operation of a website. The wow-factor of having a fully flash site complete with funky navigation and animations left right and center is not worth losing potential search engine traffic.
