Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation
August 11, 2007 by Jeff Adams
It’s generally accepted practice to publicise your internet address to as many people as you possibly can. Your address, referred to as your URL, used to be the key in making your site successful. The more people who know about your URL (domain, address), the more people would visit it.
But that was yesteryear. It was before the Internet user base went into the millions, and before everyone else built sites of their own competing against yours in attracting visitors. This was before search engines.
Google is now a household verb – “I’ll ‘Google’ it” is often a phrase I use day to day. Finding out when a film was released, the author of a book or what the hell that singer is actually singing are all Google-able.
Having a great website name in this age doesn’t make it the most visited site. For the most part, people use search engines to find what they are looking for and so we rely on the search engines to provide us with the best results based on our searches.
This is where search engine optimisation comes in.
Search Engine Optimisation is basically the methods used in increasing the ranking of your site in search engine results. The reason it is so important to be ranked in the top ten results, is users generally see these as the best matches, or probably more accurately – the exact thing I was searching for.
Left un-attended, a website can be created for a client which is rich in content, looks fantastic and all-in-all was exactly what the client wanted. The client ends up with a well designed web site full of content that is ready to go live. Or is it?
There are some questions you should really be thinking about around this time, and they are things like:
- How many users will read this great content?
- How many customers will be able to see the products?
- How many clients will become aware of my business?
Search engine optimisation is mostly about those three questions. In fact in an ideal way the answer to all of those questions would be many users, many products and many clients. You want to reach out to everyone – isn’t that the point of having a web presence in the first place?
Google changed the way we use the internet, especially in our search habits. There were search engines out there already, but what Google did was take a different approach to a “listings” site and introduced a multitude of criteria to rank its sites – these are manly link based, since the more people link to your site the more popular it must be.
Users generally stopped memorising URL’s and headed for Google as their first stopping point in finding what they are looking for.
How does this affect the designer and the client?
Well, there are many factors that will affect web site rankings, and the exact method is indeed Google’s own secret. However there are some tips to help you along the way to becoming #1 in Google ranks, and these are:
- Make use of keywords – these are hard coded into your page and aren’t visible to the user, but they are to the search engine robots. Between client and designer, you can work out which words to include in these keywords and try to limit them to around 15-20.
- Keep your pages fresh and update them regularly – add news items, stories, ` - If you sell footballs try and get your website linked on football related websites. Be sure to e-mail the webmaster of the sites you are interested in first however.
- Your image “alt” attribute – if you use images on your site, make use of the ALT tag when putting them in your page. This is the text that displays if you hover over an image and the search engine robots can crawl these. Remember they cannot see the image, so descriptive text like “Click here to go see COMPANY NAME products” is better than leaving it blank.
- Make use of headings – in HTML mark up you have H1, H2 and H3 (there are more but we’ll use these for examples). These generally tell the crawlers that this text is important, and is another way it indexes your site.
- Your title tag – this is what appears in the top of your browser – take a look at ours. This is important as it is what actually appears in Google.
- Avoid the “click here” link – be descriptive with your links, don’t just have a “click here” have something like “more information on COMPANY NAME”.
Those are just a few examples and techniques we employ, and there are countless companies out there who specialise specifically in this area. We have this as a completely separate service for clients who already have a website as well as offering it as an extra to new clients.
So there we go a search engine optimisation summary which hopefully gives you a better idea of what to think about when designing or even something to change in your existing site.