Web design should focus on appearance and functionality. A good website design gives the user the first impression of your company or business. This is the job of professional and expert web designers to create eye catching designs. A website with all the functional aspects up to the mark but with a poor web design is of no good as nobody would ever pay a visit to it, particularly with the page preview offered by Google.

Designers like images stand out on their own without a page being too text heavy but an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles. Background design and colour can be used in a clever manner to reflect the type of business and appeal to the target audience. An example of this would be to use things like blue and silver to reflect quite a prestigious company.

I think we need to acknowledge that both good design and good SEO are both important. We have all seen those content-driven websites that hurt our design-sensibilities; and at the same time, we are all probably well aware of gorgeous websites that may as well not exist because they are invisible to search engines. There are many companies telling a client that they must add 100 pages of content a year to keep up with competitors. This is just not true but good quality content relevant to the business that is SEO friendly will assist the site to increase authority.

Website designers have always done SEO, in some form or another. There are many of the same companies out there promising clients top search engine ranking and acting as if it’s some big secret. It’s not. It’s just a matter of basic knowledge of search engine algorithms and how sites work. What I hope to have reiterated however, is that the most functional, usable and SEO friendly site is never going to be very effective if It doesn’t catch the eye of the visitors.

In the last of our Video SEO Tips blog posts, Nick Rinylo speaks about the Importance of Website Design and Development when progressing any ongoing Video SEO Campaign.

Video Script

The design and development used in any website is an important factor in any successful SEO campaign.
This is particularly important for the landing pages of your site to ensure your users are more likely to stay and read and absorb any content they contain.
Secondly make sure all the information contained on the web pages is unique and uncluttered to ensure maximum impact.
The navigation of a website must be easy to understand, in addition to ensuring the title tags and other features are not cluttered with information that is not relevant.
All images should contain alt tags.
Finally, ensure you check your website on a regular basis to make sure there are no errors in the content or functionality of the site.

A well structured web site is integral to any search engine optimisation campaign. This won’t give you guaranteed success, but will certainly help to overcome any technical problems as they arise.

As the search engine algorithms constantly evolve more and more web site owners are losing their spots in the rankings as their competition becomes more competent on the technical side of SEO.

These tasks should be seen as stepping stones to a more advanced understanding of how search engine optimisation efforts can be enhanced.

1.    Robots.txt file
2.    Nofollow attribute
3.    Structure URLs correctly
4.    .htaccess file
5.    Mod_Rewrite
6.    Redirect non-www traffic to www
7.    Redirect with 301 redirects

1.    Robots.txt
One purpose of a robot.txt file is to prevent search engine spiders from consuming massive amounts of banwidth on your server. It can also prevent potential copyright infringements. A robot.txt file gives the search engine spiders information about which pages should be crawled and indexed and which should not. Without a robots.txt file, the search engine spiders will just assume that the entire site should be crawled and indexed.

If you sell copyrighted informational products or software on your site, then the search engines may be able to find and index your intellectual property without paying for it.  An Internet savvy user could then potentially download for free. By using a robots.txt file you can prevent this from happening. You can either stop the spiders from crawling and indexing the directory where your copyrighted product is located or you can disallow the search engines from indexing a particular file.

2.    Nofollow Attribute
Nofollow is applicable to hyperlinks, and informs search engines not to follow links. Linking to another web page can influence that page’s rankings, so if you want a link but don’t want to pass on any ‘link juice’ then use the Nofollow attribute. To apply the Nofollow attribute all you need do is attach rel=”nofollow” to the HTML anchor tag.

The Nofollow attribute was originally created to deter forms of web spamming especially comment spamming and guestbook spamming. Most blogs and guestbooks have the nofollow attribute on all their user-generated hyperlinks.
If you have many different themes within one site it is advisable to use the nofollow attribute when linking between differing topics as the search engines could see a disconnect between your pages and penalise you for it.

3.    Structure URLs correctly
By correctly structuring your URLs you may start to see an increase in both your rankings and the click-through rate. Start to insert relevant keywords into page URLs. Although the benefits of doing this aren’t as strong as they once were you should still structure your URLs in an organised, hierarchical manner. Both searchers and the search engines take URL structure into consideration when they make decisions about the relevancy of your web site.

4.    .htaccess file
An .htaccess file is a configuration file for the apache web sever. It’s purpose is to give you contro of the functionality of your server. It has many other uses, including rewriting your URLs and redirecting web traffic. It can enable you to password protect certain directories, ban visitors from certain sources, and preven bandwidth thft from image linkers. An .htaccess file is a simple text file and can be created in any simple text editor. It can be uploaded to the root directory of your server or any directories underneath it. An .htaccess file  uploaded to your images directory will take precedence over the root file. By taking full advantage of the .htaccess file you can prevent your hard work from being stolen or abused.

There is an excellent tool located at www.htaccesstools.com which allows you to generate a variety of different .htaccess code blocks. This tool can automatically generate .htaccess authentication code along with an encrypted .htpasswd file to password protect directories. You may want to protect your images with a customised .htaccess code to allow certain domains to use your images, as well as define a replacement image that appears instead of the actual image requested. This tool can also create .htaccess code to block unwanted robot traffic or traffic from certain IP addresses.

5.    Mod_Rewrite to Rewrite URLs
Mod_rewrite is an Apache Web server module. It enables you to redirect users from one URL to another without the user ever experiencing any indication that the redirect ever happened. It is used for dynamically generated web sites, made by content management systems.

To activate mod_rewrite add the txt RewriteEngine On to your web root directory’s .htaccess file.

Mod_Rewrite can be extremely complex and hard to use if you are not a skilled web programmer, Luckily there is an excellent free tool at http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/.

6.    Redirect non-www traffic to www
You probably already know this, but you can visit most web sites by visiting www.example.com or example.com. Although the true location of the site is example.com, the most common naming is www.example.com/. Many search engines continue to index and rank both URL variations, which can cause various problems. Search engines can mistakenly penalise you for duplicate content and dilute your incoming links. This problem is often referred to as non-www / www canonical issue. You can redirect all of this traffic to one variation or the other to maintain search engine rankings and a good user experience.

This problem can easily be overcome by adding a small amount of code to your web root directory’s .htaccess file or set up a 301 redirect from example.com to www.example.com.

7.    Redirect with 301 redirects
There will ultimately come a time when you feel you need to redesign your website. Unfortunately search engines are not exactly friendly when you make web site changes. Suppose you want to move a page from the root to a new directory, if the search engines have already spidered and indexed your original URL and your web site visitors have bookmarked your page within their browsers bookmarks, you want to be sure that both your visitors and the search engine know that page has been moved. A 301 redirect can accomplish this task, so that both search engine spiders and web browsers automatically redirect to the new page. A 301 redirect will also preserve all of search engine ranking factors, which makes it extremely important and useful.