Internet Marketing Blog

If you want your new website to perform well in search engines it is vitally important to plan your website information architecture and usability before the designers start working on design concepts.

The way you design and layout your website content and information has a huge impact on the way it performs in search engines. You need to decide what is the most important content on the site; it’s most likely to be your products or services. If your products and services are hidden away a few clicks from the home page then they aren’t going to perform well in search engines.

Here are a few factors to consider when designing a website for search engines:

1. The homepage is normally seen as the strongest page of your website by search engines. So any links on the home page will give more weight to the pages they are linking too. This will mean they will rank higher in the search engines.

2. Links and content at the top of a page are more important than links and content at bottom of the page.

3. When you label your links, make sure that they are descriptive. Don’t use the word “Products” or “Services”. If your products are “Telephones Systems” label the link “Telephone Systems”. The text within a link helps improve ranking of that term and page. Never use “Click here” link text.

4. The more internal links you have pointing at a page the more important that page will become in search engines. So try and design a site that has your main product or service categories in their own menu and that this is displayed on every page - this should be the primary menu. This will bring your services to the forefront of your website and give them good ranking. This is also good for usability.

5. When it comes to coding your website, make sure that the underlining code is clean and not ‘bloated’. By using the latest coding techniques you can move the important content and menus above the less important content and menus, even if visually they look like they appear under them. You don’t want the first link a search engine sees on your site is to go to a page such as “Contact Us” - it needs to be a link to your important content, i.e.: your products and services.

6. Try and not have off site links on the home page and always make sure they are below any important content. You do not want a search engine to come into your site and be lead straight off to another site. By doing this you are telling a search engine that you think the other site is more important than yours; this will devalue your site in the search engine, I’m sure you don’t want to do this!!!

7. Try not to use graphics for page titles or links. Search engines can’t read a graphic. If you do use graphics make sure that use the latest CSS coding techniques that can replace text with a graphic when it is displayed in a browser.

8. Homepage title text; make sure it’s not simply “Welcome to ……..”. It should be relevant to your services or products such as “Best4Systems – Telephone Systems, Headsets and Telecom Equipment for UK Business and Offices”

If you follow these basic rules when designing your website you will give yourselves a head start in the search engines.