Design and architecture
In this blog, we’re going to talk about design and architecture.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
- Describe how design impacts SEO and user experience
- Explain standard best practices in designing a website
- Describe the importance of incorporating goal-oriented designs on every page of a website.
- Identify instances where it is necessary to optimize only for search engines
Importance of Design
It’s not enough to use the right words and to get links.
These things are great but our goal is to increase ranking and get people to our website that want what we have.
So, the next part of getting them there is helping them navigate and find what they need.
We need to engage the visitor and persuade them to take action and all of that is accomplished with the design of your website.
Design impacts all of our SEO metrics.
It impacts most of the metrics you see in your analytics and it impacts basically every channel that we talk about in internet marketing.
It’s so important, in fact, that the search engines have adapted it as part of their algorithms.
Design: Best practices
One of the main principles is, as I’ve stated, that things you do to help humans will also help search engines.
This makes establishing the best practices and knowing what they are very straightforward.
Let’s just look at some of the basics.
Firstly, a clickable logo. This is a great example as it shows this concept, a clickable logo in the upper left typically.
It’s expected by people as a quick means of going to the homepage of a website.
More examples of this are having a standard location for navigation so that your main navigation is generally on the top of your website or on the left.
Again, this can vary but these kinds of signals make it easy so that when somebody comes to your website they don’t have to relearn how to use or find the navigation on every different page.
Related to this is making the links look like links.
Sometimes the design of the text hides the links and doesn’t make them obvious and it reduces the ability of people to know what or where they can click.
The most important consideration is goal-oriented design.
This can mean many things depending upon the content of the website and the purpose of the website whether it’s e-commerce or just a blog.
Finally, make the website multi-device friendly either through adaptive design or responsive design.
The goal is to make sure that your website is able to be viewed and work on phones, tablets, PCs, Macs, gigantic TVs, and any device.
Designing for search engines
On the flip side of focusing on humans, there are a few things that you need to do to optimize websites for search engines.
Now, this is kind of a funny thing because as I was going through my career as an SEO, search engine guidelines and representatives repeatedly said, designed for humans and yet these small examples or exceptions show up mainly because the search engine has some shortcomings or deficiencies.
These next few areas are about content and instructions that provide a better experience for search engines.
The first one is an XML sitemap.
XML is the format of the file and it lists all of the web pages on your website and how they’re interconnected.
You actually just put it into the root directory of your website.
You can talk to your IT people or look into how to do that.
Also, can submit it directly to the search engines.
Regardless of how you do it, you need to make sure that it is available so that the search engines can match your list of pages to the one that they develop through indexing.
Now, if your website is not able to be indexed, this can help the search engines access all of the pages on your website by requesting them directly.
Now, this also helps the search engines as the XML sitemap tells them the last update of a page.
Therefore, if that last update matches their last copy, they can save time by not indexing and processing what they already have.
The next one is the robot.txt file.
It’s a quick little text file that again, you add to the root directory.
This file just says do not crawl or index these pages or directories.
It’s a very simple protocol but it needs to be correct.
This is probably something you’re going to have again your IT team do because a few important details have a lot of technical implications.
Again, the good thing is that this can be managed with your webmaster’s tools.
Google provides a function that allows you to test and verify the robot.txt file and you can see what google will do with the instructions that you put in that file.
This next one is crawler-friendly media.
Once in a while I run into this where someone presents a beautiful video or a great programmed webpage that’s very interactive but the way they’ve done it, the search engines can’t see the content.
Now, if you use HTML5, for example, for programming, both humans and search engine bots, spiders can see the content in very similar ways.
Key takeaways
- The design greatly affects SEO metrics and how interact with websites.
- Design elements are factored into the search algorithms and are used as criteria when evaluating the rank-worthiness of online content.
- Each UR: on a website should provide value as a landing page for at least one possible search query.
- Each page should be designed around a specific and actionable goal
- Elements to be optimized specifically for search engines are XML, sitemaps, Robot.txt, and crawler-friendly media.