Integrating Web Design and SEO
April 7th, 2010
There are two fundamental factors that go into every good website appearance and performance in the search engines. Every site owner needs his or her site to look good. This ensures that visitors will stay on the page. But you also need search engine optimization (SEO) to make sure that those visitors arrive at your pages in the first place. Integrating these two essentials of a good website can be complicated, and sometimes compromises are necessary to achieve an optimal balance between the two.
The place web designers start to find the balance between appearance and performance is SEO. If SEO never generates traffic, your beautiful page design can never be appreciated. The basics of SEO include linking between pages, keyword density, meta tags, and proper tagging of images. Each of these factors is something to consider as you begin designing your site.
Your site must integrate enough text to allow for the keyword density it requires. Nowadays less is more when it comes to keyword density, so that means you need concise and compelling copy that is long enough to give you acceptable keyword density, but short enough to retain the attention of your visitors. This also means that you cannot have every possible image or screen shot on your page. If you put them there, the search engines, and certainly Google, will have no means of determining how to index your content. Words, not images, tell the search engines what your site is about. That’s why it is essential that you create multiple pages with text that can be optimized.
The next step is to tag all the images you use on your website with the “alt” in HTML. Each and every image without exception must have this tag. The “alt” tag permits you to tell the web browser which text will pop up when visitors run their mouse over the image. It’s also essential to labe every image with an SEO-friendly title. For instance if your site is about swimming with dolphins and you use a picture of dolphins on a page, a name like dolphins. swimming.jpg is far more effective than 477876ACDAW.jpg. Keywords in the tags become keywords for your pages. Just be sure you do not make your pages too keyword-dense with image names, either.
Another vital step in search engine optimization is linking the various pages of your site. Visitors always appreciate internal navigation. The search engines also appreciate internal navigation, because internal links are places you can insert keywords that identify your pages. For instance, if you have a page called “White Sand Beaches” you can link to that page from every other page in your site with a link entitled “White Sand Beaches.” This way you not only tell all search engines have created a page, but you tell the search engines what the page is about.
The ultimate rule for integrating page design and SEO Keep it simple! Use flash only sparingly. Shun excessive images. Avoid complex design. Paying attention to these important rules will boost your freedom to do SEO. You don’t have to make your website anything other than attractive, you just need to do more with less.
Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.
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