"I'm not designing my site for search engines," is a common designer objection to SEO suggestions. But when search engines collectively have more users than either Internet Explorer or Firefox, how can you afford to ignore how they interact with your site. Search engines are like the third major browser, and if your site breaks for them, it breaks for all those potential visitors from search engines. Search engine friendly sites aren't hard to create and can be attractive to both search engines and human visitors at the same time.
Moderator: Gillian Muessig, President, SEOmoz

Speaker:
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

Shari asks how many of us have heard this session before, and lets us know that the presentation has been changed. The presentation will be available for download. Do download – there's a lot of good information in the presentation.

Shari makes clear that this session is not based on her personal design preferences, but the session is based on statistics and data. She is getting PhD in HCI with a specialization in search engines. Many of the slides she shows today are not even from her clients, but ones that illustrate her points.

[missed a couple of slides]

Search engine friendly design is a user-friendly website design that can be easily found on both the crawler-based, human based search engines (web directories), and industry-related websites.

Importance of site design:
The primary importance is designing for your end users / site visitors / target audience. Design for this group first.

Human-based search engines and crawler-based search engines are of secondary importance, but you do need to consider them in your design, and accommodate your website for this search behavior.

How you place words, graphic images, and multimedia files on a page communicate the content that you feel is important to both search engines and to site visitors.

There are five basic rules of web design. They seem basic, but often aren't implemented. All rules need to be applied, they are not mutually exclusive.
- Easy to read. This includes text, navigation, etc. People will abandon website if it is difficult to read -- this was shown in a research study where every single person in the study said they would leave the site because the print was so small.
- Easy to navigate. People won't land on your home page from a search engine. They land, and they start to orient themselves onto the site.
- Easy to find, both before and after arriving on a web page.
- Consistent in layout, design, and labeling
-- communicates trust, reliability, and dependability.
-- contributes to cohesive grand and user experience
-- contributes to ease and predictably of navigation (scent of information). Jared Spool is great resource
- Quick to download
-- majority of websites should download in 30 seconds or less on dialup modem.
-- Often we're referring to perceived download time, not accurate download time. If people can't find what they need, they think the download time is much slower.

Several reasons why customers switch to a competitor's site. First two reasons are navigation difficulty and endless loops. Harris Interactive has a report on this with more reasons.

More information on easy to find:
- Needs to be easy to find on search engines, web directories, and industry-related sites.
- Sense of place -- where am I? People won't always to go the home page when they come in from a search engine. When they land on a page, they need to have some idea of where they are, and be able to find what they want within a few clicks. You need a scent of information here.
- Most important information needs to be above the fold. The wrong way to do a FAQ page is question/answer. Users and search engines don't have an indication that the information is below the fold. Best way is to put anchor text at the top of page so people know what is covered. This is also good because you have anchor text chance for keywords
- Contact information. Header, footer, about page, or location page. People look at about section for credibility of business.

All search engines index text, follow links, and measure popularity. If you don't place text on your page that people and the search engines can follow, the page will have a hard time ranking well.

You need to look at search-friendly design at the beginning of a website design or re-design. This can save a lot of time and money. If done at the end, you'll find problems like having a CMS or flash site that are very difficult to have rank well. The search people don't have to be the one that do the redesign, but they do need to help information the people that do design.

Successful SEO depends on:
- On page: Text components (index text) and using words and phrases that your target audience would use.
- On page: Link component
- Off page: Popularity component

Best practice is having on page and off page information match.

You need all three of these components. If the site is missing any pieces of the pie, it gives your competitor's sites the opportunity to rank higher.

Text Component: You need keyword rich text. You need the words that the target audience is typing into search queries, not the words that the executives think people are typing in.


When visitors view a page, does the content appear to be focused? How to make your content appear focused...
- title tag, headings, contextual links, cross links
- intro and conclusion paragraph
- product/service descriptions
- graphic image with alt text

Show someone a page for 8-10 seconds, then ask them what the page was about. If they don't know, then your content is not focused enough.

To see the visible body text (what it looks like to search engines), do a select all on the page, and put the text into notepad. Is this text focused for your keywords and theme?

Primary vs. secondary text.

Primary Text:
All search engines read and use this to determine relevancy
- title tags
- visible body copy
- text at top of page is keyword focused
- look at text in and around hypertext links


Secondary:
Some search engines read and use.
Meta tags. They can be important because it shows in the SERPs.
Alternative text. It's also important for usability, but doesn't make or break a ranking.
Domain and file names. These are not as important for ranking, but they are important in the SERPs.

Text component summary

- Use words people type into search engine on your page
- Make sure you put keywords in titles, visible body text, anchor text, meta tags, alt text.
- Focus efforts on primary text, not secondary if you're low on time.
- Place keywords prominently on pages, but don't overdo it.

Link Essentials
- Site navigation
- cross-link (not link development) among pages in own site
- type of web page
- page layout and structure
- URL structure

Fact: some site nav schemes are more friendly than others

Types of site navigation: most to least friendly
- text links
- navigation buttons
- image maps
- menus (form and DHTML) Some menus are SE friendly, some are not.
- Flash. Google can follow some flash menu, but still not good.

Search engines do not fill out forms. Don't do a lot of junk menus where people need to do a form to find information., Have two forms on nav on your site.

If a site's nav isn't SE friendly, should you avoid using it in your site design? No, do what your users prefer, even if it is flash. You need to compensate for this in other places in your website.

Example of US map image that also has links to each state below. Graphic links are clicked on more often than text links. They look more clickable.

Always have two forms of nav on your website. One for target audience and one for the search engines. They often complement each other. You need to test for your users and see what they prefer, don't always do text navigations.

Types of text links:
- nav scheme. Example of dropdown nav that also have text on left navigation.
- contextual, breadcrumb links
- embedded text links. Shows an example of press release. Lots of black text. If you add a hyperlink, the color attracts the eye, is a call to action, and lets the search engines know what is important. You can get overkill -- too many text links can make the page hard to read.
- Site map. Annotate the site map. What are the most important sections? It makes the scent of information more powerful.

On a web page you have to tell people what you want them to do. Put cdall to action above and below the fold. Your designer's opinion doesn't matter, it's how well does it convert.

Informational page characters

There are three types of search queries: navigation, transactional, and information. Ideally, search-friendly sites should have informational pages.

Contains info your target audience is interested in. Important here, it is what the audience is interested in, not the marketing department. Do not have a lot of sales hype but rather factual information. They are spider--friendly web pages. They often have a simpler layout, and they visually match the rest of your site.
Information vs. Doorway. Information page is to provide information to users, and is to provide info to users, doorway pages are for ranking.

Information pages:
- provide info
- match the rest of your site
- always reside on your web server
- no extra clicks
- high-quality link development
- end user and spider see the same page

Doorway pages:
Their goal is search engine rankings
They are often text-only pages with gibberish
They do not reside on your server
Often extra clicks
Poor-quality link development
User and search engine don't see the same page


Information page example
FAQs
Press release or media page
Tips or a how-to page
Glossary, dictionary, or reference page. These often get high-quality link development.
Location page

Cross-linking:
In addition to spider-friendly nav and wayfinder site map, all sites should have related, relevant cross links.

Hierarchical (vertical
-breadcrumb/contextual links
Category -> sub cat or parent - > child

Horizontal
upsell

Lands End is a good site to monitor, they do a lot of usability testing. If they implement a change, it's something to consider doing on your own site.

Tip: be careful with companies that claim to build information pages, these can sometimes actually just be doorway pages.

Some red flags when you talk with a development company:
- doorway pages/domains
- hallways pages
- envelope pages (invisible frame set)
- mini or micro sites
- satellite sites
- attraction pages
- magnet sites
- channel pages
- shadow domains
- theme-based sites/pages
- advertising pages
- instant link popularity
- permanent positions
- guaranteed positions
- country-specific engines

Link component summary:
- Always use at least two forms of navigation: one for site visitors, one for search engines
- Know when and how to use text links effectively.
- Always test. Don't assume, but test.
- Try to make the URLs to your most popular pages as spider-friendly as possible.
- Usability Counts

What is popularity?

- Link popularity: Number and quality of links
- Clickthrough popularity: Number of times people click on links to your site, how long end-users visit yoru site, and how often people return to your site.
- Focus on quality vs. quantity

Link development factors
- Substantial and unique content
- How other sites are link to your site (anchor text) You want a variety of text for anchor text so it doesn't look like spam, and so that it is helpful to your users.

Website usability
- easy of use
- predictability of navigation.

The business to consumer main problems, in descending B2C main problems, in order most problems. This are reasons why people abandon pages. Abandonment is increasing.
- Navigation difficulty. Need good navigation above and below the fold.
receiving error messages
login difficulty
insufficient, incorrect or confusing information
endless loops blocking transactions
search function not operating properly
being kicked off the page.

Other design considerations

Use of splash pages -- pages with "click to enter" or "skip intro". What don't search engines like splash pages? Nobody links to the site, and there is little or no text on the site. The problem is that executives often want a splash page. If you have to have one, you can add user and search engine friendly text below the fold.


Include on home page, if possible.
- Keyword-rich text
- At least one spider-friendly navigation scheme
- Links to he most important sections on your site
- Visible link to a site map


Conclusion: important things
human-powered engines
easy to read
easy to navigate
easy to find
consistent in layout, design, and labeling
quick to download

crawler based engines
keyword rich text
site and page architecture
high-quality link development

Contributed by Keri Morgret.