Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Search engine friendly web design helps your site rank well in search engines like Google, because all of the information on search engine friendly websites is fully accessible.
Glasgow Web Design believe that all modern websites should be search engine friendly by design, so we only ever build search engine friendly websites. Please call us now on 0141 424 3408 for your no-obligation consultation.
Search Engine Friendly Website Design
Search engine friendly website design understands that your website needs to be 'read' by automated programs, called spiders, in order to appear in search engine results. Certain web design techniques can block or interfere with search engine spiders, meaning that your site may be read incompletely or not at all.
Having a search engine friendly navigation structure makes sure that search engines can access every page on your site. And by providing alternative text for images, and minimising the use of Javascript and Flash, all of the important content on each page will be available to search engines. Search engine friendly web design also has to comply with the usage guidelines issued by search engines themselves.
One of the most obvious limitations is that traditionally search engine spiders can only read text. Any information stored on your website as an image file cannot be read by search engines. This can apply to a wide range of page elements, including captions on photographs, paragraph headings, and in extreme cases whole paragraphs of text saved as images. Where the use of images is necessary websites should provide an alternative text label along with the image. Alternative text helps search engine spiders as well as people with visual impairments or low bandwidth connections.
Another limitation is that search engine spiders just read the page content, and do not execute Javascript code. Many websites have been built with a navigation system that requires Javascript code to produce a nice visual sliding or fading effect. Search engine spiders are unable to use Javascript navigation systems, and are therefore unable to read the links to other pages on the site.
Finally search engine spiders have traditionally had difficulty reading text stored in Adobe Flash files. Adobe Flash is inherently visual, and it is hard for search engines to meaningfully extract text from Flash animations. Google has recently improved its capacity to access text and URLs within Flash files, but the situation is still far from perfect. Many other search engines do not index Flash files at all. And Google has similar problems with other rich media formats such as Microsoft Silverlight, as well as extracting information from any video files.
Search Engine Guidelines
Search engines themselves have issued guidelines to help people develop search engine friendly websites. There are a number of common recommendations, such as including using a text-based sitemap to help people (and spiders) find every page, using valid, clean HTML, and not storing important text content as images.
Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimisation
There is a big difference between having a search engine friendly website and having one which has been extensively optimised to rank highly in Google for particular phrases. Search engine friendly website design really focuses on avoiding web design techniques that will result in your website being incompletely available to search engine spiders. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of aggressively promoting your website in search engines, and involves a significant amount of time, effort and skill.
To speak with Glasgow Web Design about developing a search engine friendly website, give us a call now on 0141 424 3408.
