Optimizing Your Web Design

It only takes an average of four seconds for each visitor to decide whether to stay on your site or not. This means that it is essential to optimize your website’s main page not only for the search engines but also your average visitor who may buy your products, engage your services or even recommend your website to people they know.

A visitor-friendly design

A web design that carefully considers the browsing needs of your site visitors, compliments the content, and overall theme of your site can give your site visitors a good impression. Not only will they have an excellent motivation to browse through your stuff, they just might also decide to bookmark your site as a resource to come back time and again.

While content plays a vital role to your site’s ranking and popularity, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t provide them with a candy-for-the-eyes user friendly images and design. Would you opt to shop from a site with simple yet elegant layout, appropriate product images and relevant descriptive content that’s easy to navigate and browse through. Some sites may offer just about the same products and services but the way their website is presented and designed may spell the difference between high sales traffic and a trickle.

Basic things to consider

Keep in mind that there are two things you have to take into account in your basic website design layout:

First, you must keep in mind what your visitors would like to see in your site. If you plan to be in authority of a certain topic, you can’t just put on poorly designed graphics. Everybody loves colors, and a little Flash animation here and there wouldn’t hurt but remember that search engine bots won’t be able to see or index them. Your website, especially your main page, should convey something to your customers. It should communicate trust and confidence in what you have to offer them. Bottom line for your consumers, make your site easy and simple with design and with complimented content.

Second, you have to design your site search engine friendly. This could be a tad more difficult but search engine friendly sites have greater chances of topping the SERP’s rather than flashy, graphic intensive sites. Most search engines have what they call “spiders” that crawl into your website particularly your HTML codes and scripts. The easier the spiders can get to your text of your web page, the better. This gives the spiders a better view of your site’s content. On the other hand, spiders frown on a much complicated programming like that of java scripts, cloaking tactics, invisible texts, and too much flash pages.

Basic Design Tips

Here are some tidbits you might want to take note of when optimizing your web design for search engines:

Go easy with images. While you have shouldn’t have to totally omit the use of graphics and images, remember that SE spiders can only read HTML text. You just have to make sure that your images don’t overshadow your text content. Use appropriate ALT text and keyword related filenames for your images.

• Avoid creating webpage frames. Spiders seem to have difficulty crawling into web pages with frames. Same advice is given to tables and layers.

• Though tempting, minimize using Flash images and texts. The thing is search engine spiders will be having a hard time what you ought to convey through your Flash. If you can utilize your Flash designs to be accompanied by HTML, the better.

• Links, nowadays, are often blended with JavaScript which presents similar problems with spiders. It is important to note that links play a major role in getting your site ranked in search engines. If their spiders can’t get through your links and index them, you’ve wasted time and effort harvesting your vast links.

• Make use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to anticipate future changes without affecting your entire site design. CSS can smooth the flow of your website as you add content, images, or whatever future updates you may have.

Bottom line is: create a simple and interesting design for your savvy visitors and, by the by, gain better positioning in major search engines.