This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider:

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is good to use CSS stylesheets to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS. It is not good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes consise. It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management System (CMS)

If you use a CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

1. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you the flexibility in optimizing website content.
2. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.
3. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web pages. Accoding to Google's webmaster guidelines, Google may not index dynamic URL's with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how much SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers have reported that non-compliant web design can cause difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine rankings.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near the top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use multiple-level navigation menus in Javascript. However, the coding is usually left in the HTML body. This is not good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt content from HTML coding by using an external Javascript file.

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

1. Use of frames. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users can only access a part of your webpage if they are to find your website from search engines, e.g. they may only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank section on the right-hand side where your content is supposed to be.
2. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers often make re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

7. Flash

Web designers may sell you a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve the effectiveness of your website. However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your content. In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine rankings.

Conclusion:

For small businesses to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. Fancy web design, in many cases, may not give you any exposure as no one will be able to find your website through the search engines.


About The Author
Jimsun Lui, is working in Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Limited, a company offering SEO Services for both English and Chinese search engines. The company also offers Ecommerce Web Design Services with an emphasis on search engine friendliness.
http://www.agogdigital.com
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