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Give search engine bots what they want

So you think you’ve got a pretty well-designed website? Brilliant graphics, a really cool bit of Flash animation and some very clever use of video. The boss loves it and your colleagues are impressed.

Big deal. Unless the website appears on page one of a Google search, that great design doesn’t mean a thing.

As the number of websites on the internet approaches 190 million, getting found by search engines such as Google (which is used in around 80% of internet searches) is far more important than having a good-looking site. No wonder an entire industry has sprung up around optimising websites for search engines.

Of course, great website design is more important than ever to meet the aesthetic demands of an increasingly visually sophisticated community. But the best sites are those that combine the latest search engine optimisation (SEO) with cutting edge design trends.

Chris Thomas, SEO expert and chief executive of SEO company Reseo, says designers too often disregard the importance of SEO. “It’s not something that a lot of designers take into account that much until it’s too late,” Thomas says. “They usually get the bad news later, when they bring in an SEO specialist and they learn that their site isn’t up to scratch.”

The good news is that the balance between great design and SEO is not hard to manage, according to David Trewern, founder of web design and development firm DTDesigns.

“Good web design and SEO are both about the same thing. Putting the audience first,” he says.

“Good SEO is largely about having content to cover the information that the audience is looking for in Google. Good web design is also about understanding your audience. Developing an experience that is relevant to their context and needs, ensuring the site is intuitive, efficient and easy to understand and navigate, as useful and empowering as possible.”

A good starting place for designers looking to understand the importance of SEO is to look at how search engines actually create search results. Search engines like Google work automatically – there is no human influence on Google’s results at all.

There are three main parts to a search engine; bots (also known as robots, crawlers and spiders); the index; and the algorithm.

Bots: The bots are essentially automated information collectors that trawl around the web, scanning web pages and following links within your site and through to other sites. Designers and developers need to insure there are no technical problems preventing the bots from crawling all over your site.

These bots collect information and send it back to an enormous central storage system called in the index. It’s crucial to have every page on your website in the index.

The algorithm is the third and most mysterious part of a search engine. When you type a search request into a search engine, the giant algorithm program sifts through the millions of pages in the index, looking for matches within the text of those pages. It then ranks those results in the order that it believes is most relevant. Each search engine’s algorithm is kept secret from developers and SEO experts, and is constantly changing, which makes it something of a moving target.

But Chris Thomas says the key thing for any designer to realise it that search engines love text.

“I often see designers create quite ‘image heavy’ designs, particularly on home pages,” Thomas says.

“Remember, search engines can’t ‘see’ or ‘read’ images, so we need to give a search engine some text to hang their hat on.”

He says search engines typically need a minimum of 350 words per page to get a clear picture of the relevance of each and every page in your website. Search engines particularly like key phrases in headings, body text and text links.

Just as search engines can’t read graphics, they also don’t like Flash technology, which is commonly used to display animation and video on websites.

“I would be very wary of a home page (or indeed an entire website) presented solely by a Flash file if you want to rank well.”

SEO consultant Jasmine Batra from Arrow Marketing says another area for designers to concentrate on is the structure and naming of directories, files and URLs – get the names of directories right and the search engines will love you. “For example, a website page with the URL www.design.com.au/page1.html doesn’t give a search engine much clue as to the content of the page. But call the page www.design.com.au/guide-to-seo.html and watch your ranking soar.”

Batra says she is always looking for a “perfect marriage between SEO and design” and says this balance shouldn’t always tilt towards SEO needs. For example, design might take precedence on a website’s homepage, which serves as a sort of introduction to a site, often has an important branding role and should be eye-catching.

On internal pages – which have specific content and will therefore be found more often with a Google search – SEO might be more important than cutting-edge design.

David Trewern says that in most cases, the balance will be easy to achieve. “SEO tactics only compromise design outcomes when ‘black hat’ or dodgy SEO techniques are involved. Conversely, design only limits SEO outcomes when it becomes self indulgent, such as complex Flash screens, which don’t work for SEO but also compromise the user driven experience.”

There are some new tricks and technologies that can help designers create brilliant-looking design elements that are also SEO-friendly.

First, designers should always attach “alt tags” to images. These are essentially small bits of text that sit next to images in the back end of your website – visible to the search engine bots but invisible to humans. But Chris Thomas says alt tags shouldn’t tempt designers to go image crazy – Google places less importance on alt tags than it does on ordinary text.

Second, Thomas recommends the use of AJAX technologies (a combination of JavaScript and XML programming used in web applications) to de-clutter websites while ensuring they remain keyword rich. Thomas gives the example of the BBC website’s news boxes, which include small plus and minus signs as part of the menu:

When the plus button is clicked, the number of news stories displayed expands; when the minus button is clicked, the news display reverts to three items. But while the user can choose what they want to see and what they don’t, the text of the hidden news story is in the source code and visible to search engine robots at all times.

“You give people the information as they need it, rather than hitting them with a whole heap of things at once,” Thomas says.

Finally, Thomas suggest designers investigate the use of a technology called sIFR, which allows designers to display attractive website headings in text (readable by the bots) rather than as an image (not readable by the bots). This is especially important on your home page.

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Design Ready — Click here to register for Online Lifeline seminar and workshop to learn how your business can effectively reach target markets through search engine optimisation, and to ensure your website supports your business requirements while meeting your customer’s needs.

Business Ready — Click here to register for Moving the Web Forward and learn how you can achieve more with your website and measure its success. What are your client’s online needs? How do you know - how can you find out?

16 January 2009

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