styl.eti.me

About guest poster, Ben McKay

Ben McKay is a SEO Manager for Mediaedge:cia, WPP, and writes about SEO consulting and the evolving challenges in his blog, Just Me and My.  He has previously worked for a number of web design agencies in the past including Web Design from Scratch in Sheffield, Bourn Design in Manchester and more recently Corporate Design Agency, Greensplash Design in Cheshire.

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Web designers like to work with form and function to get the best design for their client.  ‘Best’ is subjective, but for me it means providing the client with as much value as the budget pertains.  And this includes maximum visibility of this website in question.  For this reason, styletime kindly offered me a chance to share a few attributes of search marketing, or more specifically SEO that web designers could quite easily adopt.

1. Heavy-Weight Champion of the Code

The code that a web developer whips together can play a big role in making a site full optimised.

Code, such as JavaScript, can make a site heavy-weight, unusable (because JavaScript is switched off) or indeed un-friendly to search engines.  An easy tip is simply to store as much JavaScript off the page as possible – preferably keeping it in one file.

2. CSS, not inline

Like JavaScript, in-line styles can be messy coding, cumbersome and well, old school.  No designer worth their salt uses in-line styles unnecessarily any more but I am still seeing stacks of it.

But why is in-line style bad news for SEO?  Search bots arrive at a website with a pre-designated amount of memory that it could use to collate info from the website in its crawl process.  The more code the bot is crawling, the less keyword-rich content it is crawling – at some point it’s memory will fill and the bot will be gone leaving pages of the site uncrawled…bad news if the site’s content is updated regularly.

3. Floating divs and text, not images

I see a lot of images used for navigation that have text embedded in the image, but what’s the problem of using a background image and floating text over the image?  This means that the text is readable by the search engines, and as links pass relevancy, trust and authority, it can be an important role.

I’d also suggest, as a general rule in the long-term, that there is more inherent trust (and SEO weight) in anchor text than there is alt text.  This is because anchor text is a visible ranking factor to users, and so is less likely to be overly-optimised in the navigation than that of the hidden alt text.

Note: over-optimisation of the navigation can play a negative role in SEO though.  Just provide a helpful and descriptive anchor text that doesn’t stuff keywords in there.  Don’t be afraid of using stop-words such as ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘on’, ‘a’, etc…

4. Flash Vs SEO

I started toying around with Flash 2003/4 when I was at Uni, not realising it’s not something you can really toy around with.  Its sophistication provides limitless design opportunities – great for creative designers – but it does come at a cost.

Flash is typically charged for at a premium compared to html / CSS so there’s a commercial reason to use it, but if used excessively it may put the site’s web designers in a bad light when the site comes up for review by a SEO consultant.  This is primarily because a poorly optimised site is certainly not a very 2009 thing to do.  Search engine accessibility and optimisation as part of a website’s build is now a must, not an option.

Good ways to use code more smartly might include using CSS for more basic slideshows, or if you’re insistent on sticking with Flash, embed it as part of an html file to give each page a unique URL and optimise around it. You could look to use the SWFObject smartly and reading the right developer resources for additional optimisation.

5. Website Structure

SEO is far more than keywords with more subtle structural aspects of websites and pages playing an increasing important role as this can communicate the importance oof the content in relation to other items on the website.  But unfortunately, the website structure can often be the biggest problem for a SEO to rectify when a web designer get’s it wrong.

So here’s a few key points to note for web developers that want to build more SEO into their builds

• Folder structure – group related content
• Flat structure and landing pages – don’t make your site excessively deep and place key landing pages in the root folder or at least closer to the root
• Hyphenate URLs – separate words in the URL with hyphens. Underscore is OK, but less preferred
• Keyword-rich URLs – make sure you permanently redirect old URLs
• Use a CMS that rocks – this is a massive topic, but ensure that site structure can me managed easily, bespoke decisions can be made to each page, title tags and headings can be optimised, URLs personalised, etc, etc…

6. A clear call to action – brand-building, results and ROI

You might think that SEO is just about driving volume to a website, but this is not so.  SEO has different goals from site-to-site, but most frequently it is about driving quality traffic that converts.

But how do we measure this quality?  Within out remit we measure the conversions, cost per accounts, the average account value, and ultimately the return on investment (ROI).  SEO is not a fluffy, blackbox exercise, but instead it’s a hardened, tried and tested marketing service.

7. Keywords and Key Results

As stated, web structure plays a massive role in SEO, but so too do the keywords used.  Your getting closer to getting your client more visibility when you inform all the aove decisions with some keyword research.  Answering the question: what and how are people searching for in your niche?  Don’t be shy about using the odd keyword research tool or two to help structure your site, build greater relevancy into your URLs or anchor text.  You can do a whole lot with this kind of information if used correctly.

The wrap-up…

A websites true design value is what needs it serves the client.  If it’s an ecommerce site that looks pretty and has loads of cool widgets, but offers little in the way of commercial intent, you have missed a trick, and most importantly the client won’t see a return on their investment.  It is a capital purchase at the end of the day, so let’s ensure a multi-discipline web design service is delivered.   Design and development could do a great deal to help website owners get the most out of their website and online visibility.

These are quite obviously general rules and bespoke site-by-site decisions need to be made but I hope they helped a tad in prompting a little more inclusion of SEO in to the website design and development process.  And thanks for reading!

What are your thoughts?