SES Munich 2007 - Designing Search Engine Friendly Web

Mar 26, 2007 - 5:30 am 0 by
Filed Under SES Munich 2007

This is live coverage of SES Munich 2007 by Gilad of SearchMarketing.co.il contributed to the Search Engine Roundtable conferences coverage series.

Tim presents Shari Thurow, webmaster / Marketing director from GrantasticDesigns.com , actually reads most of her bio from here - http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/munich07/sthurow.html

Define a search engine friendly web design – search engine design is NOT: - A user friendly web design that can be easily accessed by end users, users are primary. - Human based search engines and crawler based SE are secondary.

5 basic rules of web design: - Easy to read - Easy to navigate – where am I? give the user a sense of place. - Easy to find - Consistent layout and design. - Quick to download All in all: EASY TO USE The focus of this presentation: Easy to find, what/where should it be easy to find?

- On search engines, web directories, industry related sites. - User lands directly to the relevant page, where am I? - Within 7-8 clicks, preferably less, as long as – scent of information, where can I go? Use KW focus to find user's goal. - Put the most Important information above the fold (shows an example) - Contact Information – Users look for it, don't hide it.

How search engines work? (Shari: this is the most important slide here) : - Index text (all crawlers. On page criteria) - Follow Links (all crawlers. On page criteria, I guess she means Internal links) - Measure popularity (off the page criteria)

All 3 components are Important.

The biggest mistake in SEO – promote the site AFTER the design and the site's launch, instead you should practice SEO as early as possible.

What kind of text to pay attention to? - The words your target audience is typing into search queries - When visitors view a web page, does the content appears to be focused (Title, heading, Introducery, Conclusion, shows an example)

Primary VS. Secondary text: Primary – Titles, Visible ,Top text (including header), In and around hyper text links Secondary: Meta tags, Alternative text, Domain and file name

If you have the time – do both, If you don't – focus on Primary.

Link component: - site navigation scheme - cross linking - type of web page - text anchor links - URL structure

Types of site navigation from most friendly to non friendly: - Text links - Navigation buttons - Image maps - Menus (form and DHTML) - Flash

Shows navigation and sitemap samples.

Informational Pages - What is the target audience interested in? - Do not use a lot of sale hype but rather factual information - Spider friendly pages - Often have simple layout - Visually match the rest of the web site

Doorway pages - Pages that rank but usually don't sell - Extra clicks and/or redirects - Often reside on different server - Poor quality link development - End user and SE don't see the same page

Tips from samples: Create an Industry Glossary, use Call to action, show locations and contact details, use relevant cross links.

Shari shows some non recommended methods – Hallway pages, directory information pages, shadow domains, channel pages and more.

Link component summary: - provide access and relevancy - use at least two forms of navigation - use text links effectively - spider friendly URLS - Usability counts

Popularity - Number of links - Quality links - Number of times people click - How long end users visit the site - How often people returns to a site First two apply to ranking, other 3 don’t, at least not yet

Check if your site visitors: - continue navigating the site - link to the site - bookmark the site - return to the site - Answered YES? Popularity is going up, NO – going down.

Popularity component summary: - quality is far more important then quantity - high quality links takes time - Usability counts

More basic samples – alt tags, title tag, splash pages, flash usage

Conclusion – Pay attention to Human based percpective : easy to read, easy to navigate, easy to find, consistent layout, easy to download.

Crawler based: kw rich text, site & page architecture, high quality link development

Q&A

Mostly basics, Sari speaks about her book, writing a second one

Disclaimer- Sorry for any grammar or other mistakes…

Gilad, SearchMarketing.co.il

 

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