Web Design and Search Engine Optimization

Web design should be search engine friendly if it is to find and online audience. Some of the major search engines have recently begun to place a greater importance on the wording in html text links. For example, if you use the text link wording "a web designers portfolio" to link to a web designers website, it will yield a better search engine result than using an expression like "click here" to link to the same site. Websites must be designed with properly worded html text links to provide more accurate search results. I recently redesigned a website with this as one of my primary objectives.

In the old design, the page was too dark and many of the links are not worded carefully to give search engines a full and accurate description of the pages they link to. Also, I wanted more text on the first page so that there is a wider range of keywords that search engines can index. Text is the only component of your website that matters to search engines. Therefore, pages that are heavier in content (text) tend to have higher search engine traffic than pages that are primarily graphics.

The redesign is shown below. Notice that it has full text descriptions of each link. Also each description is loaded with keywords that are likely to be used in search engines to find that page.

The end result will be that more people will find this website from search engines and precisely the information they are looking for.

Key points from this article:

• Use text links with well chosen wording to improve the search engine ranking of your website.

• The more relevant content (text) your website contains the more traffic it is likely to generate from most search engines.

Donald Peterson