Search First

Many firms offer SEO as a bolt-on extra to their web site design services but the underpinning principles of SEO should be factored into all design projects. Factoring in these things during the design phase makes for a more efficient web site and ensures that it remains consistent rather than adding hodge-podge changes after the design is completed.

Good Site Structure

Excluding four page sites, a good web site should have a sensible structure with an intuitive navigation. Behind the scenes you should look to create a sensible URI structure also.

Analysing your site structure means examining how to best segregate all the different areas of a web site. An engineering web site with a range of products and services would likely segregate their site like so:

/
/products
/products/lathes
/products/lathes/model-xyz
/products/milling-machines
/services
/services/technical-support
/services/installation

By organising your site in such a way, you ensure that Web spiders can accurately assess the purpose of your content; an additional boon is that you also assist your human visitors with a sensible URI scheme that they can easily comprehend if they wish to return to your site at a later date.

Using a CMS that uses URI slugs as opposed to ID based query strings (access the Model XYZ page through http://example.com/products/lathes/model-xyz instead of http://example.com/products.php?cat_id=02&prod_id=3) is a system SFD employs for all sites designed - both CMS and static.

Titles and Metadata

The title and meta elements should be as important as the rest of the content when building a web site from the start. If you can factor a good title and description to each page from the “get go” then you are saving yourself trouble later on. The title is the primary concern and then afterwards you should consider whether there is anything that you can to the page via the <meta content="description"> that isn’t already included in the existing content then adding it here can be beneficial.

The title of each web page is the text that forms the link text in the SERPS and is a major indicator of the context and purpose of the page itself. Ensure that the title is brief yet descriptive. The title of the web page located at /products/lathes/model-xyz could possibly be “Model XYZ - Lathes: Example Engineers Inc”

Make use of attributes

Apart from the obvious alt attribute that you must use when images are being used to replace what you would otherwise convey through words. If you are linking to a page, ensure that you aren’t using “click here” as link text. If a page on our Example Engineers Inc is about Model ABC in the Milling Machines product category then the link text should be Model ABC. If you wish to go further then the title attribute on the anchor element can be used to give additional information about the link (that visual browsers will render via tooltip); the title attribute text would possibly contain “Model ABC - Milling Machines”.

Using “click here”, “here”, and other short snippets of that nature not only hinders your progress on the search engines but also reduces the usability and accessibility of your web site; users of non-visual or non-computer browsers that use link text to provide alternate measures of navigating a site will have a lesser experience because they will see lots of “click here” links and may not be able to know where they lead.