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SEO and Web Design
By Irina Ponomareva (c) 2007

When we talk about the relationship between SEO and web design,
it's usually the technical part of the website design art that's
relevant, not the visual part (though certain aspects of visual
design have their impact on SEO/SEM, as will be shown below).

One of the latest trends in the SEO industry is to put more and
more emphasis on quality web design in the overall SEO process.
If you aim at a long term success online, you need to know
exactly how design and SEO integrate.

Make Your Design Work For You

Good website design is like a foundation for the building of
your future SEO success. The more aspects you think about before
you start working on your site, the fewer obstacles you will
meet later when you start looking into SEO, web promotion, ROI
and other important aspects of your web presence.

Good website design includes such things as internal linking
structure (i.e. navigation), folder structure, URL generation
and naming conventions, coding, page download time, Usability
and a lot more. If your website is interactive and uses
additional dynamic functionality and tools (e.g. a newsletter
subscription form with built-in verification and unsubscribe
features, or e-commerce functionality), you will need to make
sure that all of your client-side and server-side scripts work
flawlessly and are not open to abuse of any sort. And of course,
the back-end of the website (content management) should be well
thought out prior to starting.

If You Are Going To Redesign Your Site

If you need to redesign an existing site (as opposed to building
a new one from scratch), you will encounter even more problems
and you will need to take these into account to ensure success.

One of the most important decisions you will have to make is
whether to keep the old URLs or to restructure the site and move
to new, more SE-friendly, URLs.

Of course, if the URLs in your old site are already SE-friendly,
the decision is simple: you need to preserve them. This way, you
won't waste the fruits of your previous achievements; indeed,
the improvements you make to your site during the redesign will
eventually help you to enhance them.

But what do you do if your old URLs are dynamic with a lot of
parameters in the query strings and are unreadable and confusing
from a usability point of view, adding nothing to your SEO? Your
pages may still have rankings in the SEs, which you would
certainly like to preserve. If you reproduce the same ugly URLs
in the new version of the site, you'll achieve this, but make
further progress impossible. If you move to better URLs (and
then 301-redirect old pages to new ones on a per-page basis),
you will probably lose your rankings for a short period of time,
but benefit in the long run.

The answer, in this case, is no longer so obvious. It will
require a lot of statistical analysis, followed by brainstorming
sessions involving your company and, if relevant, your client.
All interested parties should be well informed of the existing
options, as well as the benefits and the complications (risks)
each of those options involves.

Notice though that if most of your search engine traffic is
directed to your home page, then you have nothing to lose and
should stick to the second option.

Another question that arises when a website is about to be
redesigned is the choice of a content management system (CMS).

Of course, if the site is relatively small (with less than, say,
1,000 pages), and you are ready to support it using manual
coding and an FTP client, you won't need a CMS at all. The only
automation necessary in this case is either PHP (ASP, JSP)
includes or SSI (if supported). They will save you a lot of time
when you need to edit a repeated block of code (like a
navigation menu bar). A change made once will be reflected on
all pages automatically.

But if the site is large and requires complicated dynamic
functionality (like newsletters, an automatically updated RSS
feed, a shopping cart or customised data tracking), or if your
client doesn't have any HTML knowledge but needs to update the
content regularly, then a CMS is the only way to go.

What is a SE-friendly CMS?

In order to be SE-friendly, a CMS should at the very least
comply with the following criteria.

  * URL-generation flexibility. You need to be able to choose
    how your URLs will look, including file and folder names,
    file name extensions and conventions. A CMS that forces you
    to use dynamic URLs is definitely a bad one. Also, a good
    CMS won't generate session IDs for guest users and search
    engine spiders.

  * Title and meta information management. You should be able
    to assign a unique title tag and unique description and
    keyword meta tags to every single page, or set up a pattern
    that will generate this information dynamically.

  * HTML management. The code generated by the CMS should be
    valid, or the software should at least provide opportunities
    to make it valid, if you have the necessary knowledge. For
    example, if the HTML editor used in the CMS converts all
    HTML tags into capital letters or removes quotation marks in
    attributes, you will never be able to validate your code for
    XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1, which are now preferred coding
    standards.

  * CSS management. The CMS should provide a CSS editor to
    professional web designers who know how to write CSS styles,
    and a smart CSS generator to those who can't handle the task
    manually.

  * Robots.txt management. You should be able to edit your
    robots.txt file without an FTP client. If there is a default
    text for the robots.txt, it should be a valid default
    robots.txt, not some gibberish.

The best choice for the valid default robots.txt should be
this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This file defines what the bots are allowed to crawl and what
they should stay away from, and provides yet another reason to
use static URLs rather than dynamic. When your URLs don't
contain dynamic parameters in the query string, it is much
easier to control them in the robots.txt file on a per-page
basis. If your site has dynamic URLs, you might want to look
into mod_rewrite (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/
mod_rewrite.html)to make them static.

Things to Avoid

Yet another important consideration is knowing what to avoid. If
you keep the following rules in mind when you design your site
from scratch or redesign it, life will be much easier for you,
but if you ignore them, your web presence will be affected
detrimentally.

Over-bloated code. The more HTML tags and other stuff you have
in your code, the longer it will take for each page to load up
in the browser - and the harder it will be for a search engine
to extract the useful (content) part of it.

JavaScript redirects and JavaScript-based navigation. JavaScript
is not parsed by most search engines. There are rumours around
that Google is starting to follow JavaScript links, but that's
probably just one of their newest experiments that will never
turn into anything serious (like their earlier attempts at
reading text embedded in Flash). If you want your navigation
links to be spiderable, use plain text links with "href"
attributes.

JavaScript redirects is a technique loved by doorway creators,
so if you use it you can inadvertently get yourself banned, or
at best make your site utterly SE-unfriendly, especially if you
redirect the home page. Incidentally, your home page's URL
should always end with a "/"; for other purposes, the only
option is the 301 redirect.

Disallowing the whole site via an incorrect robots.txt or using
an invalid robots.txt file. Remember:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

is the correct code if you wish to allow all pages to be crawled
by all spiders and bots, but using

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

means they will ignore your whole site. When your whole site is
dropped, re-indexing can give you a headache, as the engines
sometimes have problems with crawling sites quickly. The Net
grows daily, and even Google (which used to be the fastest at
crawling websites) has seemed to behave oddly since the start of
the Bigdaddy update.

Google is also very sensitive to invalid robots.txt files. If
your robots.txt is incorrectly written, it can get your site
partially or even completely de-listed. We recommend that you
read the Web Robots FAQ (http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html)
and validate your robots.txt file
(http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml) to avoid
unnecessary complications.

Too much graphical content. Graphics (especially when animated)
and Flash slow down the page's download significantly. That's
more of a usability issue than an SEO issue, but usability is a
part of SEM, as it affects ROI and conversions. So do test your
pages on a slow dial-up connection, and if it takes too much
time to download, lighten it. Believe it or not, a lot of people
around the world still have no option but to use a slow dial-up
connection.

Making your site worse than it was. This of course only applies
if you are redesigning a site. If your previous version
successfully validated for W3C standards, don't break it; better
still, try moving from HTML 4.01 to XHTML, or from table-based
coding to CSS-based positioning (if you feel able, of course,
otherwise it can be a frustrating experience). If your
navigation was handy and intuitive, don't make it more confusing
in the new version; better still, add more navigation options
that the previous version lacked. In other words, let your
redesign be a step forwards, not a step backwards.

Visual Design and SEO

As stated above, SEO is more than a technical discipline; the
visual design has its implications, too. Too often, visual
design and SEO are perceived as a mutual sacrifice. Graphic
designers often think websites exist to demonstrate their
artistic abilities, and don't care much about content. SEOs, on
the contrary, would prefer to keep graphics to a minimum, thus
increasing the SE-friendliness of the pages and minimising the
code bloat. Visual designers prefer to create menus in images,
so they can use some fashionable "blurred" font or whatever; it
won't be long before an SEO then comes along and yells: "What
have you done? I need text here!"

"Your content spoils the look of my design" seems to be an
unwinnable argument in our industry. Sooner or later, the
parties usually find a solution that suits them both, but too
often the compromise leaves everyone unhappy. And yet there is
no need for any sacrifice at all if the designer and the SEO are
ready to cooperate from the start.

It makes me happy to see more and more websites that are both
good looking and 100% SE-friendly. Three years ago, a common
question in the SEO forums was: "Why do you SEOs all have such
ugly websites?" But it's no longer an issue, as people are
starting to realise that there is no need to sacrifice the look
of a site for the sake of search engine friendliness, or vice
versa.

Actually, the visual design is just as important a part of
Internet marketing as are SEO and usability. It may seem like an
obvious statement, but websites that are pleasing to the eye
convert better than do ugly ones. Of course, it's impossible to
please everyone when it comes to visual design, as some people
love minimalism, and others prefer a lot of funky, flashy
graphics - but as the concept of SE-friendly design is gradually
becoming more familiar to web users, overloaded designs are
going out of fashion and minimalism is now viewed as elegance.
For a website representing a serious, trustworthy business,
elegant minimalism is now a must.

The Harmony of the Web

Summarising the whole article, I would like to repeat once more
that all aspects of an online presence are slowly finding a new
type of harmony. Harmony means quality. Quality means success.
SEO and web design are just two important parts of this harmony,
and in the upcoming "SEO and ..." series of articles (of which
this is the second), I'm planning to give my readers more
details on how SEO integrates with other aspects of web
harmony.

To be continued...
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Irina Ponomareva joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK) on March
2003. She has been acting as a web master, a developer, and an
SEO specialist ever since. After practising search engine
optimisation for a year, Irina then launched Spider Friendly
(http://www.spiderfriendly.co.uk/) - the autonomous SEO branch
of Magic Web Solutions (UK) offering SEO/SEM services - in
co-operation with her colleague Dmitry Antonoff. Currently
acting as a moderator at IHelpYou SEO forums.
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