SEO Friendly Design

October 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

2093298_lowSearch Engine Optimization is not all about links and keywords as some people might think. This is obviously a very important part of the puzzle though (as are many other elements). What a lot of people overlook when optimizing their site is the need to properly “design” their site for seo and that includes such strange and bizarre concepts as organization before you put mouse to pixel, consistency and attention to the code behind the scenes that visitors never see.

I’ve been doing this for many years and I’ve learned a few things. Some of them are important and some are not so important. But one thing I have learned is that SEO has a lot more to do with design than people usually admit. I even forget this rule myself sometimes–or–maybe it’s so ingrained in the way that I work that things just happen automatically during the process.

In this six part series of posts I’d like to take a look at a few of the design considerations you should make when you’re learning seo friendly design concepts. I hope we can touch on at least a couple nuggets that you haven’t thought of before. Read more


Posted by chris.auman | Filed Under Blog 

SEO Friendly Design: Part 1 – Crawlability and Cross linking

October 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 1 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design:

Pay attention to the crawlability of your site.

This process is also referred to as web crawling or spidering and it includes designing your navigation so it’s easy for the search engines to index, cross linking throughout the site and the construction of a comprehensive site map.

Crawlability

Crawlability is essentially how well a search engine can find all the pages on your website. It’s also the engine’s ability to properly document what the pages are all about.

One of the biggest problems that sites face in this regard is the use of graphic images as navigation and (worse yet) informational content as graphic images on the page. Yes, back in the day I too was guilty of this massive SEO blunder. If you have any interest in ranking well in the search engines you have to be polite and guide the search engines and give them easy access to all of your content. Read more


Posted by chris.auman | Filed Under Blog