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Designing for Search Engines When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your
visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is
that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a
completely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at
your pretty logo and they're not going to be passing judgement
on your background colour. What they're looking for is the
content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of
probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please
these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.
Make Your Structure Clear
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways:
you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the
navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are.
As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the
heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things
clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every
'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're
quoting someone, use the blockquote tag; if you're posting
program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with
keywords in hope of a higher search ranking - the engines have
pretty much wised up to this tactic - but do make sure that your
keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For
example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website'
throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would bring
down my rankings.
HTML and Javascript
It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't,
in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to
insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search
engines to see the text. On
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