How to Integrate Web Design and SEO
Every designer knows that there are two basic qualities of every good website appearance and performance in the search engines. It is critically important for pages to look good to keep visitors on the page. But visitors will never arrive at the site to enjoy that good design without search engine optimization (SEO). Integrating these two fundamentals of effective website design can be complicated, and compromises are sometimes required.
The place to start finding the balance between appearance and performance is SEO. If you never generate traffic, your beautiful page design will never be appreciated. The essentials of SEO include keyword density, linking between pages, meta tags, and proper tagging of images. Each of these factors is something to consider as you begin designing your site.
Every site has to have enough text to allow for appropriately low keyword density. Unlike the standards of the’90s, modern search algorithms penalize sites, and sometimes penalize them severely, for cramming too many search terms, or even words that look like search terms, into too little text. Your content has to be long enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to captivate your visitors. This also means it is not possible to put every screen shot or image you might happen to have, no matter how attractive they are, on every page. The search engines have no way to index images. Words, not images, drive SEO. That is why every website designer has to give every site 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 important step in SEO is to include links between the pages of your site. Besides offering your visitors internal navigation that keeps them on your site, the links you create with keyword-rich text help the search engines index your pages. For example, if you have a page on your travel named “Wildlife Safari,” you could create a link to that page from every other page on your site with the keywords “Wildlife Safari.” This way you not only signal the search engines that you have created a page, but you tell them what the page is about. It might be more fun to post a picture of you racing up a tree to escape a charging lion, but the image does not have the same impact on SEO.
Is there an ultimate rule for integrating page design and SEO Yes, and here it is: Keep it simple! Use flash sparingly. Avoid excessive images. Shun complex design. Paying attention to these vital rules will boost your freedom to do SEO. You always want your pages to be beautiful, 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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