First off, what is SEO ? Basically it is a way of optimizing your site so that it can perform well in search engines. Obviously the search engine king; Google is the main protagonist of SEO. Climbing up the rankings is the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) has become the life of many a web master, but could life be made easier by combining initial design and SEO to save time and money.
Many web designers have complained that SEO has “plagued” the ability to design websites that work well from a user perspective or an “Aesthetically pleasing” point of view. In some areas this it true, but can there be a cross over between the two, where a harmony and equilibrium can be found, in order to create the “ideal” site.
I am going to show you how SEO and design can work together, not only to create a perfectly operational SEO based site, but also a fetching and unique design.
I don’t really want to take any other sites to illustrate mistakes in designs and SEO, so instead I will take a site that I work on, and describe how things work. This site is a Diving Holidays tour operator:
This site uses a very striking design with some very powerful features. However it is quite difficult to see how this site is separated unless we actually take it apart and have a look. So below is a framed diagram of this home page:
At the top of the site there is a very clearly labeled Navigation menu, with a drop down list for separated areas. Then below is a very striking banner image, however to utilize the SEO aspect of the site it has text overlaid to incorporate keywords.
The third section of this page clearly labels the sites top diving destinations, providing a usability perspective and the opportunity to naturally maintain some more keywords on the site. Mentioning destinations where diving is prolific gives the site more relevance and the opportunity to utilize the alt text in the images, and the header tags as well.
The next section is purely informational, which is one of the most important aspects of the site. The main advantage in having a CSS designed site is that you can quite easily and effectively layout the site exactly how you want.
Some very good programming using Java Scripts and CSS can allow the site to be portrayed in almost anyway the owner wishes. Back to the informational part, you can see the text and the clear header tag as well, both using keywords in them.
Many H1 tags across other websites will clearly label the term the owner is targeting. This one takes a more subtle approach using a more natural header. The blog posts are a great way to bring in news snippets from other parts of the site, and also allow fresh content to be dragged onto the front page.
Next up is the footer sections, an easy way for people to quickly navigate to and from the site.
This website allows users an easy way to travel through a website, but also to experience a very calm and pleasing design structure. If you visit the site you will notice that no Flash has been used and Java Script is the dominator for scrolling techniques. This site is only 1 year old and is already ranking number 3 for the term Diving Holidays. This shows the power of a well designed site with an SEO perspective placed behind it.
This is a Guest Post by Mark C , who works for Fresh Egg
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20 comments
Its a good concept of mixing SEO and designing together in a site to optimizing your web sites and Its a cool stuff
It’s everybody’s dream for their website to be on the top rank and doing SEO is not an easy task. Thank You ;).
I use a simple rule when developing a site for SEO compliance. “Could a blind person navigate my HTML structure?” If yes, I know spiders will understand and index my site.
I usually use kiss. Keep it simple, stupid.
Nice writing. Sadly all the free SEO WP themes are ugly as hell.
Thanks for the write up. Good detail and really provides some assistance to some of us. Much appreciated.
all leading designer are now designing themes and templates keeping in my site SEO, A good Design and SEO together are lethal combination 🙂
you explained that quite nicely. I am in the middle of designing a few sites and this would be a great way to map them out and see for myself. Thanks for the advice. SEO is forever changing and evolving its nice to see new way emerging.
Very good explanation of SEO in conjunction with design. I wonder if there could have been more text on the home page. I tend to like longer home pages with the ability to capture more longtail searches. Your thoughts Mark?
This was a quite a good read. I learned quite a bit about SEO and the design of a site. 🙂
Google now wants us to check page speed. Up to a certain degree, it stops me from adding more and more load on page. The more images and user friendly menus I put, the more heavy my page is.
Its really a great combination of both for site/blog success. I admire those writers who share the best of their knowledge in writing such articles. Keep up the good work and continue inspiring readers.Thank you so much.
The designing is great I would say. Coming to the SEO point the article says perfectly true. You can easily do this things and you are done with the on page optimization of your page.
I think, making any site seo friendly should be the primary focus while designing and developing any site as the traffic is totally depends on the well designed structure.
Does It Cost Money To Publish Your Site Designed Using MS Fronpage Or Other Web Designing Sofware To Internet?
I don’t know what to do with this website website is called Blog or Not To Blog and my itention was to kinda mix all news i find online that are for blogging and stuff. But now i don’t really know what i am going to do with it.
Can you give me some ideas? Do you like it at all ?
@Dany
That sounds like a great idea. You should probably mix in a pros and cons system or something that goes along with blog or not to blog.
Just throwing ideas out there.
I still think off-site SEO is the most important thing you need – not that you don’t need on-site SEO, but off-site is much more important.
Its really good to see that now web designers are also understanding the view of SEO to the site and they are doing the proper thing to give the site good value in the market.
Yes, SEO is one of the key components for any online business.