Four tips for optimising your website design for search engines
Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing use robots to index the content of your site in order to rank it for various search terms and provide relevant web page links for people when they enter a query into a search engine.
Certain website design elements make it harder, if not impossible, for these robots to index the content of your website. This article outlines the design elements that should be avoided if you want to improve your position on search engine results pages.
On this page:
Flash
Using Flash for website landing pages can give a website a modern look, and you might be tempted to use it thinking it will impress your website visitors. But you use Flash at your own peril because most search engines are not able to crawl or index Flash pages and this can negatively affect your ranking on search engine results pages. If most of your web content is embedded in animations or graphics, it can't be 'read' by search engines.
If you decide to use Flash, try to do so in a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)-friendly way by:
- Using small Flash files within your pages rather than building your entire site in Flash.
- Providing Flash and non-Flash versions of your site.
- Adding descriptive text to your page, with targeted keywords – even if people have to scroll to see it.
Dynamic content
Sites using dynamic content usually have a few base templates with the content for each page stored in a database. When the page is viewed, the page template retrieves the content from the database on the basis of information requested. Search engines are able to index dynamic pages with one parameter, but multiple parameters often used by larger sites cause problems for most search engines. The end result is they often don't index these web pages, and this will affect your SEO results. It’s usually better to create static pages for your website that use keywords in the URL to help search engines index these pages.
Graphics
Just as it's tempting to use Flash, it's equally tempting to use a lot of graphics, photos and colour to draw attention to your site. While this works for humans, it fails dismally with search engines. Search engines are text readers and can't 'see' or index graphic content. On a graphic-heavy page, there might not be enough text for search engines to consider the page relevant.
Apart from making sure you have enough text to support your page, you can also make use of the Alt IMG tag in your HTML code to let search engines (and visually impaired viewers) know what images are on your site. Don’t label you graphics 'Photo 1'. Use keywords such as 'silver chain bracelet' or 'horse riding in Hanmer Springs' to make your pages more search-engine friendly.
Graphical navigation
Although it looks pretty, most graphical navigation menus and navigation buttons, including clever JavaScript rollovers and drop-down menus, contain CGI scripting or JavaScript and can't be indexed by search engines. For the best SEO results, the solution is to use keyword-rich text-based navigation menus, which load faster and can be indexed, either instead of, or in addition to, graphical navigation options.
