Design Your Website For Optimal Effectiveness

The architecture and design of any Web site will play a major role in search engine rankings. A design emphasizing aesthetic values and flashy gimmickry may command an award for design, but they will seldom be indexable by search engines robots. One could potentially end up with a nicely designed site that no one else can find.

Conversely, a site that provides rich content but is devoid of any aesthetic value may not meet all the needs of Web authors or end users despite otherwise fantastic search rankings. For these and many other reasons, Web authors must take special care when designing their sites to ensure that they will be accessible to all users - mechanical or human.

Since a thorough discussion of design could easily fill an encyclopedia, this document will simply provide a list of design considerations along with simple rationale for each.

Design Checklist.

• Make sure each page is reachable by at least one static link. If a search engine cannot find your document, it will never show up in a user inquiry.
  
  
• Offer a site map with links that point to important parts of the site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, break it into separate pages. These help search engines locate all of the content on a site
  
  
• Keep URL's simple and static. Complicated URL's are difficult for people to type and hard to remember. Additionally, longevity is a factor in search ranking (more on this later...).
  
  
• Keep the site hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each page should only be one to three clicks away from the home page. This aids both humans and machines in navigating the site.
  
  
• Minimize the use of Macromedia flash as well as Java applets. Although they can add useful demonstrations and animations to a site, they are not indexed by search engines.
  
  
• Avoid the unnecessary use of frames as search engines often have difficulty indexing them correctly.
  
  
• Since dynamic page content is expected to change frequently, the relevance to search keywords will probably not be maintained. Moving content to static pages will improve indexing and lighten the load on the Web server.
  
  
• Make sure internal pages link to the homepage to aid navigation.
  
  
• Organize content by topic and divide the site into logical sections, each focusing on a given topic. This allows search engines to better target specific information relevant to keyword searches.

A Web site that is optimized for search engine effectiveness will be as easy to navigate as a good book. The home page should read like a table of contents, linking visitors to relevant information organized into useful sections.

Sites which feature dynamically generated content such as forums or weblogs should still incorporate static HTML pages to aid search engines. Images, animations, scripts and videos should be used only when text is inappropriate and they add to the value of a given page.