More than the visuals and the aesthetics, a web design project must focus on the approaches that are advantageous for achieving good search engine results. Search Engine ranking is very crucial for delivering the content of your website to the user through search results and enhance its reach.
Content having HTML text format perform better in the search engine listings. Despite of continuous advancements, Search Engine Crawlers fail to crawl the content with Graphics, images, Flash files, Java applets etc. For a search engine, it is easier to crawl HTML text. However, there are several advanced techniques for achieving formatting or styles. We shall look into from the perspective of designers that how can their design practices contribute to the Search Engines.
Design Practices That Will Enhance Search Engine Ranking
- Plan Your Design- As it is a common practice imposed on in most of the design projects taking into the consideration few visual elements viz. design layouts, User Interface etc. however, it is equally important to think about the SEO. Some planning measures include graphic design options, titles etc.
- Get Rid Of Splash Pages- Although Splash Pages might seem to be useful in case you are trying to promote any specific product or service, but having them on your website can influence Search Engine Rankings. Splash pages may annoy your visitor allowing them to immediately leave your website.
- Design For Text- One of the ways that excites designer is employing beautiful-looking graphical content to please the visitors. However, there are some limitations to this approach. Although graphical content enhances graphics design but at the same time, it restricts crawlers to look into the information as they are incapable of reading information that exists in the form of graphics. Fortunately, the advancements in HTML and CSS have made it quite possible to add text to the graphics on the web page. A number of plugins can also be used to allow text within the graphics.
- Validation Of HTML Code- By validation, we mean verifying HTML codes against errors. A good idea is to run the written code through HTML and CSS validator. Search engines do not actually care for the code to be completely correct, instead, they look for the basic rules being followed to index your web pages. However, if you write incorrect code in any part of the website, that part of your website is likely not to be indexed in the search engine’s database.
- Eliminate Content Duplication- Content Duplication means having similar information on different pages of your website. Such pages can adversely have impact on the SEO. It can be avoided using CMS that generate different URLs and notifies you in case you publish duplicate content on your website.
Bottomline
The approaches that we have mentioned above are to be followed by designers in accordance with SEO principles. However, it won’t ensure you with everything in search engine optimization. In addition, you might probably need to practice SEO approaches to rank higher in the search engine ranking.
