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Design VS. SEO: Can My Site Look Good and Rank Well?
Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic
elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later
in this article I'll show you a real case scenario and the
design and SEO approach used.
Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the
top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay
for such insight. That said, it's certainly possible to employ
high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most
basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300.
However, it's the top of the scale where efforts seem almost
inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a
tiny change in rank.
How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain
significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?
DESIGN CAN'T BE IGNORED
If you have an existing site, you've probably tied it into your
existing promotional content. Even if you've allowed your
website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should
still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.
The reasons for doing so are valid, and can't simply be ignored
for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If
your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling
around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying
link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic
pillars of search engine optimization.
And, you aren't alone if you have this disheartening thought--If
I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board,
who would stay at my site because it's so stale and boring I'm
even embarrassed to send people there!
There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The
first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi
million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your
website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties
and giveaways with your logo.
Since chances are that's not you, and certainly not me, lets
look at the second option. It begins with some research into
your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a
designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at
least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a
combination of people with these skills that can work very well
together.
DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB
That's not the whole truth, but it will help compare and
contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and
detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web
design has to catch a viewer's attention in 5 seconds. It's
pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire
brochure in less than 5 seconds.
Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and
poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be
on your pages. But if it's not well organized and broken down
into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about
what you're offering.
CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO
Sadly, it's very difficult to optimize a site without completely
overhauling it. You'll soon understand why. Design and SEO must
be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a
true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example
of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword
phrase, "pumpkin bread recipe."
From a design standpoint "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" would be the
heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words
perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule
around it.
There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading.
However, there is only one way that is best for both design and
SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition,
that line of code containing "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" needs to be
as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also
allows).
To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were
located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin
bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.
SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions.
Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the
ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin
bread recipe.
Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a
table in this example if you didn't use CSS. Search engines
don't like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that "extra"
code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt
rank.
Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you
need to get all of that content organized would normally just
add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a
search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through
page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth
character of unimportant
code to find the relevant text.
Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less
code, more content.
SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO
In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for
almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the
text to the right of the photo.
Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but
done so using other programming methods. The page could very
well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done.
However, without designing and programming for optimization as
in the above illustration, the end result would have no
significant rank compared to others that do.
You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to
rank for the keywords "pumpkin bread recipe". Note- why did I
use the number 30? It's safe to assume if you're not on the
first three results pages of a search, you're not being seen.
While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it
would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing
it. This isn't always the case, but extrapolate this into
detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is
greatly magnified.
AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC
Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like.
The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must
now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If
you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to
make some compromises in these areas.
Understand exactly the role your site should play in your
company marketing.
Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience?
Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients?
To venture into yet untapped market segments?
Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your
site?
Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral
that must reflect the same graphical look?
Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is
it your sales force?
Chances are you wont have any single answers. That's ok. It will
give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a
solution for you.
REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY
If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of
exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up
images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to
sell any of that jewelry.
If such a company approached me with this project, my
recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have
to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be
slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to
capture the buyer's attention. If it's very expensive jewelry,
the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it's home
made jewelry, the site shouldn't look home made.
However, as you have no store front, if the online community
can't find you, you're business will fail. So I'd have a very
optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your
product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great
sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions
below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics
built out of CSS and you've got a cool to look at, content rich,
well optimized layout.
I'd make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent.
Note the catalog is not the homepage. I'd also include
subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of
some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few
images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing
so you're creating relevant content for search engines AND
providing additional pages that can rank.
The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and
you have the foundation to build your search rank.
PLANNING YOUR SITE
If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to
work with your designer from the initial development stage of
your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not
dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name
around, then you will have to optimize.
However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a
very flexible and attractive design element with endless
possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid,
unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very
creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren't
the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close
working relationship.
About the author:
John Krycek is a creative director at theMouseworks.ca Toronto website design..
Learn more about search engine optimization, internet marketing,
web development and graphic design in easy, non-technical, up
front English at http://www.themouseworks.ca !
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