Throughout the history of this blog as well as the history of consultation with my clients, I’ve said time and again that a website’s design should be created with SEO in mind. If the design is created for purely look and ignores all flexibility for SEO, you’re throwing your money away as you’ll just have to pay your designer to recreate your site from the ground up. After all, what good is a great looking site if nobody’s going to see it?
So, what is the perfect design layout with SEO in mind? Short answer, there is none. Long answer, it’s the design that gives you the flexibility to execute every SEO strategy you want while maintaining the crisp, clear look you want. Further to this, here are a few different types of common page layouts, along with their SEO implications:
1. Frames
-old style code which was once easy to work with, but has been replaced by newer design methods
-terrible for SEO; would often inhibit spidering of content within the frames
2. Flash
-often used for animation and changing images/movies
-should be used to present images and not text
-should only comprise the minority of a pages content, along with another design structure
-content nested within Flash content is very hard for search engines to pick up on – not recommended if you want to SEO the content within the Flash structure
3. Tables
-replaced frames as a site layout; can organize entire pages into rows and columns of varied size and look
-table cells are transparent to search engines – they can easily pick up on content nested inside these cells
-much better SEO-wise than frames and Flash, however search engines read content according to which cells appear first on the page (eg. if the main content of your site is in the 4th cell, it will be ranked in importance after the content in the first 3 cells, which may only contain things like a company logo or site navigation)
4. CSS
-short for “Cascading Style Sheets”
-functions as a universal template/master file created on your server to apply to every page in your site that you want (can drastically reduce the amount of code required for search engine spiders to read through to get to the ‘meat’ of your content)
-functions as a type of HTML – is fully spiderable
-allows the designer the flexibility to present to search engines the content in order of importance, despite what content may appear first to the website visitor (using properties such as “float”)
Ultimately, you’ll need to speak with your designer about how you want your site to appear. Your designer should be able to create a look that replicates your idea using CSS to minimize bulky code and maximize SEO flexibility. Keep in mind that techniques like Flash and table usage in a site are not necessarily bad usage is measured, and when presentation of priority content is kept in mind. Virtually any type of design can be created to accommodate all SEO needs, so the look you want should not have to sacrifice the traffic you can attain.