Web Page Design

Web design is critical when optimising your site for the search engines. Many people consider the look and feel of their site as number one priority.

How can they buy from you if they can't find you... read more

Design is important but at Net Visibility we feel that a well designed site deserves to be seen and used.

A fully optimised site will take longer to develop initially, but will pay big dividends in the future. The easier you can make it for a spider to gather information throughout your site, the higher your pages will rank and the more visitors you will attract.

Spiders like consistency and can recognise patterns such as simple things like pages beginning with a title in the form of a header as opposed to a larger font. This is because header content is considered more descriptive of what is actually on the page.

Text is important as well. Spiders weigh the content that appears highest on a page much more heavily than what follows in the middle and lower sections. Consequently, make sure that you include keyword rich content as high up on the page as you can. A good rule of thumb is that spiders will heavily weigh the first 25 words.

Some recent studies also suggest that spiders may assign more weight to the ending section of a page. This possibly suggests that at least some spiders are looking for 'conclusion and summary' information.

When creating textual links, try to make the links a keyword. Keyword links will garner much more credit than ‘Click Here’. Certain sites look fantastic from a design point of view but in reality they can be a major stumbling block for a search engine optimisation. For example, sites designed in frames, image maps or flash are a major problem for search engine spiders, as they cannot read them. Therefore your site will have little or no visibility to the outside world. Don’t worry if you already designed a site in frames or flash. Many of Net Visibility’s customers have.

In such circumstances our Net Visibility analysts have created a network of search term-specific micro-sites, connected both to each other and your home site. These sites retain your corporate look and feel and therefore protect your brand integrity but are compatible with all web formats as well as human directories and robot engines, to ensure optimum listings. Each micro-site is individually created, registered and submitted according to each search engine's specific criteria. In such circumstances, Net Visibility registers the new domains in your name ensuring that you retain complete control of your brand.

Finally, don’t try to be too clever. In an attempt to increase web visibility some designers try to spam search engines by repeating keywords in a tiny font or in the same colour as the background to make the text invisible to browsers. Search engines are catching on to these and other tricks. Expect that if the text is not visible in a browser, then a search engine may not index it. Whilst Password Protected Pages are pages you probably don't want indexed anyway, be aware that like a human, the spider cannot enter any area that is protected by a password.

• 8 Simple points to website design click here >>
• What to know about bad website design? click here >>
• Search engine optimisation and framed designed websites click here >>