seo for website design & development - technical considerations
TRANSCRIPT
SEO For Website DesignTechnical Considerations
By Lauren L Perfors
02/04/2013
Lauren L Perfors | www.lawtondigitalmarketing.com
Table of ContentsBy Lauren L PerforsSiteMaps
XML SitemapHTML sitemap
NavigationLogical navigation structureMain Navigation Order301 Redirects
Content & StylingKeep Important Content Out of JavaScriptStyle Text With CSSNO Flash
ImagesImage SizingImage Alt Text
URL StructureURL TextUsing Hash Fragments to Navigate in URLsURLs and Duplicate Content
Site Loading & SpeedJavaScriptCachingCSS
SEO for Website Design Tech Checklist
Lauren L Perfors | www.lawtondigitalmarketing.com
SiteMaps
XML SitemapExplains your website to search engines. It is the search engine language equivalent togiving a tourist a map of a city. The better search engines can understand your websitestructure, the better they will index it.
● WordPress CMS plugin Google Sitemap Generator● XML sitemaps need to autoupdate! Making a static one with no future updating is
selfdefeating, because it will eventually not match the website as the site is updatedand the sitemap will become more confusing to search engines than helpful.
● Sitemaps go at this URL www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml● To learn more or get more technical, check out the SiteMaps.org protocol● Define your sitemap in your robots.txt file, like this:
HTML sitemapAnother sitemap! This one is coded to be userfriendly, and is meant to help usersunderstand the website. Google also likes the HTML sitemap because it shows that youprovide users a way to get to all aspects of your site from a single location. Google likes itbecause it improves the user experience.
● URL www.yoursite.com/sitemap● Link to the sitemap in the footer.● Sample HTML sitemap http://www.widesmiler.com/sitemap/● WP Plugins WP Sitemap Page
Navigation
Logical navigation structureSearch engines look at your navigation structure almost like a human would. They assumethat your toplevel navigation are your most important, core pages. For optimal SEO, yourhighest value SEO pages should also be in the toplevel navigation where possible. If you
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have layered navigation (subnav or side nav under certain toplevel), those pages shouldall be closely related to the top level navigation page that they sit under. Google sees eachsubnav page as most relevant to categories related to the main nav item it sits under.
Main Navigation OrderYour main navigation should be in order of priority starting with the most important pages onthe left. For example, on the example below, the navigation here tells Google that Articlesare the 2nd most important page behind the home page.
301 RedirectsWhen launching a new version of a website, every page receiving a decent amount oforganic search traffic should be redirected if the URL structure is changing to the mostrelevant page.
Content & Styling
Keep Important Content Out of JavaScriptKeywords must all be visible to search engines. As a quick and easy test, view the sourcecode for the page in your browser. Anything you can read, Googlebot can read too. Googlehas admitted that they will fire “some javascript” but I recommend avoiding placing anySEOvaluable content within scripts since you can not guarantee that it will be indexed. Ifthe site code calls to a .js file, no matter where the file is located, Google does not knowwhat is contained within that file.
Style Text With CSSIf you create buttons, highlighted text, logo slogans, or other highly designed text, it issometimes easier to create the text and image as an image file and insert the image in tothe site. Text as part of an image is not visible to Googlebot, so will be ignored. Here are afew common examples:
● Home page banner sliders by placing these prominently on the home page, you are
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telling search engines that this is an important part of your site. Yet Googlebot cannot read the text if it is embedded in a big image file, so Google may not be able tounderstand what the banner is for.
● Buttons to take you from one page to another. Buttons with embedded images fail tohelp Google understand what you are telling the website visitor to click on.
NO FlashSearch engine crawlers can not crawl the contents of flash. Since HTML5 can do nearlyeverything that Flash can do (and take up less bandwidth), there should rarely, if ever, be areason to use Flash on a new website build today.
Images
Image SizingResize images to the size that they should be displayed on the website. Avoid resizingimages with CSS or with HTML on page. If a browser is told to display an image at a certainsize, it still has to load the full size image called out in the HTML, then displays the size itis told to display. The more large image files must be loaded in the background, the slowerthe site. For example, on www.widesmiler.com in the footer:
You’ll see that the code pulls in the image atits current size of 80x80 because the img srchas no image resizing.
On this website http://www.blackstonerenaissance.com/,the image size is 300x208 yet isdisplayed on the site at 240x160:
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Image Alt TextEvery image should have descriptive image alt text. Think of a short, concise description of5 or less words.
URL Structure
URL TextUse descriptive, efficient URLs. An easy way to decide on URLs is to think about how aperson would look at it. If a person could easily decipher what the page is about by theURL, Googlebot probably can too. URLs should describe the page. They should also syncwith your navigation structure.
Using Hash Fragments to Navigate in URLsGooglebot ignores everything after a hash fragment (#) in a URL. Website design utilizing alarge, long page with a “#” to take a user directly to specific content is becoming morecommon, but this is not search engine friendly! Here are a few examples
● # style URL structure resulting in poorly indexed content http://www.drscholls.com/drscholls/conditions/index.jspa#foot. Scroll through thetabs for “Foot Conditions,” “Lower Body Pain,” and “Skin Conditions.” If those weresetup as individual pages at separate URLs, each could be optimized for uniqueterms. As it is set up now, Google ses it as one large page with a ton of content onall different topics. Due to the clutter, it can not be indexed under any of the termsbecause Google will not see it as the most relevant result for any of them. Googleviews this as one long page of content, and the visitor sees it as 3 pages. Thediscrepancy from what Google sees vs. the visitor results in poor SEO:
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● Utilization of AJAX to result to load unique content sections throughout thenavigation structure without reloading the design and background:http://html5.gingerhost.com/. These are seen as 3 unique pages of content:
Lauren L Perfors | www.lawtondigitalmarketing.com
URLs and Duplicate ContentDon’t allow content to appear at more than one URL. The most common examples are:
● Both pull up the home page http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com. Theversion without “www” should redirect to the “www” version. For example, typing in“http://marketinglauren.com” redirects to “http://www.widesmiler.com”.
● Content on eCommerce sites and blogs frequently appears at more than one URL. Ifthe same content appears at more than one URL, Google views it as duplicatingcontent and will often penalize you.
Lauren L Perfors | www.lawtondigitalmarketing.com
Site Loading & Speed
JavaScriptWhere possible, Javascript and jquery calls should be as low on the page as possible.Minify javascript files for quicker loading on site.
● WP Plugin Better WordPress Minify
CachingEnable caching to ensure minimal new downloads to the browser for an enhancedexperience for repeat visitors.
● WP Plugins W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache
CSSUse only what CSS styling is necessary to support the site design. If CSS styles are notbeing used, they should be removed. CSS files should be minified.
● WP Plugin Better WordPress Minify
Lauren L Perfors | www.lawtondigitalmarketing.com
SEO for Website Design Tech Checklist
XML SitemapHTML SitemapLogical NavigationNavigation Ordered By PriorityOld URLs Redirected (301) At New Site LaunchImportant Context Indexable (not in javascript or embedded in images)Images all have alt textImages sized as displayedAll content available at only one unique URLAll URLs concise and descriptiveJS files in footer (or as low as possible on page)JS and CSS minified
Lauren L Perfors | www.lawtondigitalmarketing.com