Web Design Tips

The first part of this article

Web Page Optimization Techniques showed you some techniques for creating Website content that will maximize your chances of getting an appropriate listing and good position on the major search engines. But content is not all there is to SEO--the way your pages are designed and laid out is important too.
Design and layout considerations are mostly a matter of knowing what to avoid. Why is this? Certain design techniques may create visuallystunning pages, but they hide content from the search engines. You may have the best page anywhere on a certain topic but if the content is
hidden from the search engines you won't get many visitors.

Frames
I explained in an earlier chapter why I think frames are best avoided altogether. If you need another reason to avoid frames, here it is: frames can seriously hinder or prevent altogether the proper indexing of a page by the search engines.

Remember, frames are a way to present two or more independent windows on a single page. The main page--the one that you want listed in the search engines--usually does not contain any content but just the frame
definitions. Each frame then displays a separate HTML document where the real content is located. But--and this is crucial--the search engines do not see this because it is done by the user's browser; the search engines see only your content-free frames page. This is not good!

Flash Animations
Flash is a popular program that can create truly stunning animations, complete with sound, navigation buttons, and dynamic content, for display on your Web page. The problem with Flash is, as you may have guessed, that it too hides content from the search engines. Anything in
a Flash animation might as well not exist as far as the search engines are concerned--including the hyperlinks which means that the search engine cannot follow the links to locate other pages on your site to index.

Used within reason, Flash is fine. There's no reason not to have an attractive Flash banner at the top of your page. But the program is powerful enough to create complete pages, and that's not a good idea from the SEO standpoint. Google will find a link to your flash file off your Website, but they will not able to index the contents of it. You want your page content available where the search engines can find it.

PDF Files
PDF stands for portable document format, a file format developed by Adobe specifically for distribution and printing of complex formatted documents. Many Websites use PDF files to allow the user to download and view or print documents such as product manuals, catalog, and
instruction sheets. When used properly PDF files are a great tool, but search engines cannot index their content.

Image Maps
An image map is an image that has been divided up into several sections, with each section serving as a hyperlink to another page. You have probably seen them used for geographical maps where you click the state or country of interest to go to the relevant Web page. All very nice, but links in an image map are not readable by a spider robot so it can prevent the further indexing of your site. If you must use an image map you should also include a more traditional set of links using HTML for the search engines to use.

Javascript Navigation
Links that are within Javascript code cannot be followed by search engines. If you want to use Javascript for navigation within your site it's a good idea to also include traditional HTML links for the spiders to follow.