SEO Friendly Website Design

Introducing the Search Engine Robot

The search engines do an amazing job of compiling information about websites all over the world. Search engines such as Google have a complex and vast network of computers dedicated to scouring the web and storing the information they find in large databases. Gathering details on so much web content is a big job, and is accomplished by automated methods. Search engines send out automated robots, often referred to as “bots” or “spiders”, to discern the content of a website.

During Design - Consider the Search Bots as a Target Audience:

Search friendly design means that we will consider the behavior and preferences of these automated bots as we design your website. This is a critical step to gaining search rankings as it ensures that the work that we put into creating and optimizing content on your site will be noticed by the search engines.

Formatting Page Content in a Language that Search Engine Bots Understand

The automated search bots have limitations on the type of content that they are able to parse as they investigate or “crawl” your site. Search engines read HTML text content with ease, but struggle with content that is placed in Flash, JavaScript, images, or other non-text formats. It isn’t uncommon to find websites, designed almost entirely in Flash, that are effectively providing very little information to the search engine about their content. Flash and images may be visually appealing content to humans, but to the search bot they are a foreign language to be ignored.

Search Friendly Design Points Used by SEO conductor:

Critical navigation menus are coded using a CSS text based structure. We avoid the use of Flash and Java script technologies that make it impossible for the search bots to follow your site’s navigational links.
We ensure that important details about each page’s subject matter are communicated in html text based headings and body text. Any images are there to embellish visually and are not relied on to inform the search bot about the subject matter.

Keeping the Path Clear for the Search Bot as it Crawls Your Site

Using proper coding practices ensures that the search bot will be able to follow the syntax of your page’s code without issue. If a search bot encounters errors in your coding or broken links, it may stop parsing the page. As a result, complete info on your page will not be stored in the search index.

Standards Based Coding:

Our sites are coded using the latest web standards. We avoid the use of dated table based layout. Sites are coded using XHTML and CSS and are tested to be W3C compliant. W3C is an international committee for web based standards.
Since content is added to the site over time, we will also be testing your site on a regular basis to ensure that there are no coding issues or broken links as the campaign moves forward.

We Build Your Site in an SEO Friendly CMS

In case you’re not familiar with the concept, CMS stands for Configuration Management System and is a way of organizing your site’s content such that it is easily managed and updated. There are many CMS apps on the market to choose from, but we have settled on an open source app called ModX. We have found that ModX is a very flexible and intuitive application that lends itself well to SEO principles.

You can read more about the ModX CMS here: http://www.modxcms.com/

Use of Friendly URLs

Have you ever come across a page that looks something like this: http://www.domain.com/categoryA/scripts/section/section.asp?NS=PERS

Have any idea what this page is about based on the URL? We sure don’t, and neither does the search bot. We will configure ModX CMS so that all of your pages have user friendly URLs which are concise and use descriptive text instead of cryptic character strings. Not only will this make for a URL that is more intuitive for the end user, it will also give the search engine additional information as it indexes your page and attempts to discern what it is about.

Avoiding Canonicalization

One side effect of using most CMS apps is that there are often multiple URL addresses for your site that point to the exact same content. An example would be the home page which can often be addressed by several different URLs such as:

http://mysite.com/index
http://mysite.com/index.html
http://mysite.com/index/
http://www.mysite.com/index
http://www.mysite.com/index.html
http://www.mysite.com/index/

On many CMS apps, entering each of these addresses will take you to the home page, however to the search engine they are actually all unique pages with duplicate content. Canonicalization is the process by which the search engine attempts to determine which of these addresses is truly the authoritative URL for your home page. When these duplicate URLs exist, it is also possible to have inbound links that point to variations of the same content. This can hurt your ability to rank for a page.

Avoiding Duplicate Pages:

We will configure ModX CMS such that these duplicate URLs are all redirected to a single address. This means that the search engine will only index one address per page and will not have to make any guesses as to which page is the authoritative version.
We set up 301 redirects such that your site will always be addressed by the concise URL of http://mysite.com. If someone links to your site using the “www” version (http:/www.mysite.com) they will be redirected to the short address. If you strongly prefer the “www” version, we can configure things the other way around, but the point is that all of these links will be working towards building up the PageRank of your authoritative home page of choice instead of their impact being diluted.

Designed for Usability

Usability is very much tied to successful SEO. Poor site usability can result in a high bounce rate, meaning that visitors are not spending more than a few seconds on your site. If visitors leave your site frustrated by your design layout, the traffic you have worked hard to earn will be unproductive. We create website designs that are clean, uncluttered, and intuitive for the end user.

SEO friendly design doesn’t have to mean a plain and boring site either. We will use images and CSS formatting techniques to keep your site visually appealing while keeping plenty of search friendly text content.

Designed for Flexibility

Optimizing your pages content will include doing things such as carefully selecting the text that appears in the html heading text, title tags, and Meta description tags.

The CMS is Configured to Allow Easy Updating of Important Tags:

ModX CMS is setup so that the page title, H1 heading tag, and Meta description tag can easily be revised on each page.