Search Engine Friendly Web Design
by Matt MacDougall
Design for People and Search Engines
When designing your website don't forget that search engines will be reading your website along with people. Search Engines are a big part of your audience. A Search Engine is the early adopter of your content. They are the audience members that will take your content and try to make sense of it for other audience members to find it. In this way a search engine can be the most powerful member of your audience.
Plan for Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Search engines like reading plain text in a clear content hierarchy. Search engines also appreciate well thought out formatting cues to indicate the most important information and logical breaks in the content. The more you use graphics, animations and video to get your message across, the less a search engine can understand. If you are not careful the search engines will not be able to understand your message and will not tell anyone about you.
Organize your Content
In my blog post about writing clear organized content the guidelines for helping a person understand your website can also help a computer understand it.
- Write general information that feeds into increasingly detailed information.
- Use titles, subtitles and lists to help stay organized.
- Get to your point with minimal fluff.
Using Graphics, Audio and Video
When you use graphics on your website stick to the following:
- Fill in the "alt" attribute of an img tag. This allows you to describe the image so that computers can read what it is.
- Alt attributes do not allow you to say that one image is more important than another.
- If you have some important text in the image, make sure you put that text elsewhere on the site in a heading or bold tag.
When using audio or video on your website look at the following:
- Associate some relevant plain text along with your video or audio file that describes what it contains.
- Craft your script like you would content for your website with a clear content hierarchy. If a search engine ever does read your video, the transcript will be clear.
- Take advantage of an rss feed to publish new video or audio clips. This widely approved standard for sharing information will help to categorize your media files.
