Search engine optimisation and marketing consist in delivering targeted traffic to your website via search engines. Search engines deliver more than half of the web's traffic. But good performance in search engines is not enough. Your site could rank on #1 for a broad range of keywords. Unless your website manages to keep the interest of users alive and convert visits into sales, then all the effort and investment is in vain.
The design and structure of your website are key factors in search engine optimisation. A properly designed site that complies with current web standards is similar to a nice birthday cake. The traffic coming from search engines is the icing and the cherry on top. They make the web presence a sweet and savoury affair. And it's not just the pretty pictures that are important but all essential elements: navigation, text, readability etc.
How Search Engines Assess Good Design
Search engine spiders are robots, they don't have a notion of beautiful or ugly, well designed or badly designed. They analyse what a web site has and what hasn't. Good website design for search engines is not so much a creative process, it's more an analytical one. Search engines look for the following in a site:
- Does the page have a title and description? If yes, what does it say and does it describe accurately what the page is about?
- Is the navigation made up of graphics or of text links as well? If there are text links, what link text are they using?
- What sort of structure does the site have? How are pages linked to one another?
- How is the content presented? Is it broken into paragraphs and are headings and subheadings marked correctly? Is there any emphasis on key ideas?
- What technology is used to build the website and how search engine friendly is it?
- Are there additional elements such as ALT and TITLE attributes to enhance description and information?
So you see, website design is more than just design, it's building an informational unit that is functional, appealing and is search engine marketing oriented. Your web site must turn visitors into customers, bear that in mind when you hire a company (a design company or a SEO) to build your site.
Accessibility as Part of The SEM Strategy
This article was first published on 09 August 2004 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
