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Design and Accessibility

August 31st, 2008 | Author: Michiel Van Kets

Many web designers are so focused on the design part of building a website, that they will unintentionally affect its search engine rankings. It is a total shame to create an attractive website that does not attract any visitors. There is no point to all that beauty if no one can find it. Here are some ordinary design mistakes that should be kept away from whenever possible.

Image Links
If your navigation menu consists of images to form the buttons instead of text, the search engine bots will be confused. It makes it difficult for search engines to spider and index your site. What if you do not have any other option than image links in the navigation bar? Add ALT text to the image links to give meaning to the image. Make sure that you have text links somewhere else on the page as well. The footer is a nice place to have a few more links.

Frames
When using frames in a site, the problem is that most search engines will only see the frame loader page and ignore the rest of the page within. If you do not have any choice but using frames, offer lead-in pages that are not placed in frames. This means that you can put all of your beautiful frame-based pages in other locations.

Splash Intro Pages
Beautiful intro’s or entry pages, often using flash animation, are impressive to human visitors, even though many of them will ‘skip the intro’ quickly to get to where they want to be. For search engines, however, such a introduction is not impressive at all. The spiders will think that this is the index page and will not find it useful at all. Often, the only text on these intro pages is “skip intro”, which does not say much about the rest of the site.

In order to get the top rankings in the SERPs, your will have to help the search engines a little bit. Their spiders will have to find your site, and be able to navigate the site, and read all of your content, before they can rank it. Some graphic elements will affect the accessibility of your website and are better avoided. Surely it does look nice, but who is there to see it if your site does not attract any visitors?

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Posted in search engine optimization, webdesign |

Tags: design, graphics, seo, spiders | No Comments »