Design With SEO In Mind
July 4, 2008 – 9:49 amPeople want their websites to look beautiful, especially if these are business websites where the main focus is on attracting clients. Towards that end, webmasters may go ahead and include various kinds of design elements on their websites to grab their visitors’ attentions. But in doing so, they are possibly making the fatal mistake of ruining their website for search engine optimization. It has happened time and again. A good looking site, great content, high ranking keywords, but one design mistake… and the whole site goes from the top pages of Google, Yahoo! and MSN to the irrecoverable depths of the Internet.
So what are these design mistakes that should be avoided? Here are the top three:-
- Focus on the HTML code of your website. Many times, your website will look good and be functional even if there are faults in your HTML. This is because you may not be checking all elements of your website every time. Even a single fault can actually spoil the SEO of your webpage. Hence, you may need a professional to look at it. Also, get your sitemap done with HTML coding. Image coding for sitemap generally confuses the search engines and they overlook it.
- As far as possible, avoid using Flash animation. To the search engines, the Flash file is a whole lot of gobbledygook. Most times, they will only perceive Flash as gaping empty spaces in your site and they will simply no-rank them. But if you want to take the risk with Flash, you must ensure your webpage is content rich and keyword optimized.
- If you are using JavaScript, do that somewhere at the end of the webpage. Avoid putting it at the top of the page because this is where the search engines will concentrate on, in order to rank your page. This applies for CSS too.