Search engine optimization is not only about keywords and web content. Although these two elements are highly valuable for SEO, there are other elements that are also being considered by search engines. One such element is WEB DESIGN. A clean, excellently formatted, and well structured website design is what most experts call as Search Engine Optimization Web Design. Sometimes, web designs that are not geared for SEO can affect the ranking of a site. So, here are the common SEO web design mistakes that must be avoided by any webmaster: Firstly, always remember that search engine crawlers are blind. They can detect text but they cannot appreciate graphics. Crawlers treat graphics as jumbled codes or unreadable text. So do not create a web site that is mainly graphics driven. It may look good but it will be useless in the eyes of search engines. The website therefore will remain unknown because it will not be indexed by the search engine crawlers. Secondly, Make sure that the website does not have any broken links. Navigation, outbound links, sitewide links, should be working properly. Not checking the status of links will impact significantly on rankings. A web site with poorly maintained links will not get the approval of search engines. They will treat it as damages site thus not worthy of attention. Thirdly, do not create flash homepage. These types of index pages have become popular in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. But creating a Flash home page is a sure suicide for websites. Crawlers will not understand Flash graphics therefore the website will certainly be doomed before it can take off.
Above points are absolutely correct if we see in the perspective of the SEO but also avoid long and complex URL because it is hard to remember for visitors and not helpful for SEO and the second thing is that the structure of internal linking should be proper.
Yes great sharing This is worth at least a 3-year follow up posting by people agreeing and adding other points.
coreseo, thank you for specifying the above points , the points are great and understandable, and to the point, great sharing
this are the 3 golden rules that everybody should know, the fact that there are still people who brake those is disappointing
Re the first point, using graphics that search engine crawlers can't see, doesnt adding the alt tag to the image html cater for this? I may be wrong, but thought that something like < img src="http:// www. random .com/image.jpg" width="100" height="100" alt="Random Image"> enabled the crawlers to index the content even though in graphical format - agreed not possible if using background div images but if using foreground images I always add the alt description tag
Thanks for great SEO tips. Being a web developer myself, I also must insist other web developers/designers to avoid the above 3 mistakes and also: 1. Keep the design simple with user friendly interface 2. Navigation should be visible and clear 3. Try not to use Cufon / fancy fonts as they are not readable by google spiders and hence are not indexed into the search engine Cheers