Most people agree that content is the most important factor that the search engines consider when they rank a page but many do not know that the web page design is also of paramount importance when it comes to search engine optimization.
The first thing to consider when optimizing a page's design is the page size. Most modern designers are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to keep the page size small and tidy. Web pages designed by conventional tables can take up a lot of disk space. Thus, extending the indexing time required for a page.
Internal site navigation is also important as this is the only way to allow the spiders to follow through and index all the pages. Using textlinks for navigation menu is the most reliable way to ensure that search engine bots will not miss out any pages. However, if a fanciful JavaScript or Flash menu must be used, the site owner can include a textlink version at the bottom of the pages for bots indexing.
It is also advisable to avoid using frames on web pages. Frame-based page does not allow for unique URLs, which makes indexing pages separately problematic. Although there are ways to get around this problem, Google has also suggested web masters to avoid using frames.
Some Search Engine Optimizers have found that the search engines do consider where does the content on a page appears. Most search engine classify content nearer to the top as more important than anywhere else. Therefore, many web masters place their content right after the header. Some even go to the extend of using CSS positioning technique to generate a content-first template so that the content will appear before any navigation menu.
Search engines are known to ignore Flash powered sites as the bots cannot index the content inside a Flash plug-in. Therefore, it is advised to create a HTML based site with minimum Flash plug-ins than to have a full Flash site.
In conclusion, keeping a web page simple in design will help to facilitate the indexing of the content by the search engine bots. As far as SEO is concerned, a simple web page design with rich content is the key.
About the Author
KC is a SEO consultant with several years of related experiences. His advice has helped several Webmasters to increase their SERP. KC is the Founder of the free CSS templates website. KC also has a site providing free SEO techniques.
