Web Design for SEO:
Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals

Once you have your hosting situation taken care of, you are ready to build your site - or begin to modify your current site. As with hosting there are some ideal web site design architectures - and there are some not-so-ideal site architectures for SEO purposes. It is up to you to determine what kind of web site best suits your business, and then you can incorporate SEO into site design accordingly. It is also important to understand that by "design" we refer to a handful of things, including identity & UI, as well as navigation and information architecture design. Below is a list of general overview of the do's and don'ts with regard to website design, keeping SEO in mind.

Ideally, your web site will be created using an SEO-friendly CMS - and although the search engines are improving their abilities to read Flash content, we prefer to steer away from entirely Flash-based websites, for in these sites there is very little "text" for a search engine spider to read, as the site contains only pictures of text. However, incorporating Flash elements into the design is not a problem. If you have a dynamic website, you will have to structure your site's content in such a way as to invite and facilitate the crawling of your pages.

In both instances, you will want to develop robust content to populate your site's pages, and most businesses have a wealth of unused content just waiting to be published to their site, including print marketing materials, white papers, client testimonials, research materials, and mindshare. But unfortunately, many businesses fail to make use of this free, readily available, and extremely valuable content - and your search engine rankings are suffering for it! SEO copywriting for the search engines are very, very important issues and this topic should be a primary area of concentration when designing and maintaining a web site for search engine friendliness.

For dynamically generated websites - these are sites that pull their web page content in "on the fly" - objects are pulled together based on a particular user request. Without proper url re-writing in place, countless web sites that produce page upon page of valuable, relevant content are missing out on the opportunity to maximize their indexing and ranking exposure.For more information, check out our page on SEO technical issues.

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