SEO Friendly Web Design

Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content. A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. This article addresses specific technical considerations for building or updating web pages to serve both search engines and human visitors effectively, and is worth sharing with the programmers, information architects and designers involved in your site.

Indexable content

To rank better in search results, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Search engine crawlers often overlook or undervalue images, Flash files, Java applets and similar non-text elements, despite technological improvements. The most straightforward approach to making displayed text visible to search engines is placing it within the HTML structure of the page.

Crawlable link structures

Search engines require visible content for indexing and visible links for discovering pages. A properly structured link architecture that crawlers can follow is essential for indexing all of a website's pages. Many sites make the significant mistake of designing navigation systems that search engines cannot access, preventing complete indexing.

Keyword usage and targeting

Keywords are central to search. They form the basis of language and searching, and the entire field of information retrieval, including web search engines like Google, relies on them. As engines crawl and index web content, they organise pages using keyword-based indexes rather than storing billions of pages in a single database. Specialised databases focused on individual keywords or phrases enable rapid data retrieval.

If you want your page to have a chance of ranking in the search results for 'dog', it's wise to make sure the word 'dog' is part of the crawlable content of your document.