Pillar #2 – Website Design________________________________________________________________________
Website design, pillar #2, aims to make the best use of the keywords you
have chosen for your site. In addition this pillar helps you position your keywords in the most appropriate places on your site.
The main aspects of pillar #2 consist of behind the scenes coding, navigation structure, onsite optimization, the precise relevance of each page and improving conversion rates.
Behind-the-scenes codingThe ‘behind the scenes’ coding on any website needs to be as efficient as possible to assist with search engine optimization.
When designing sites using software such as Dreamweaver, although it’s constantly getting better, surplus and repeated code can sometimes still be generated. For example, in Dreamweaver, if you highlight some text and make it bold, then remove the bold at a later point, some duplicate code has been known to be produced.
Note that this isn’t any slight on Dreamweaver – Dreamweaver is probably one of the best pieces of software available for designing a beautiful website without any knowledge of HTML code – but you can never 100% replicate the ability of a human website coder.
So while some software is excellent for designing websites, the best solution for optimizing the code is somebody manually checking to ensure all unnecessary code is taken out.
One method of keeping your web page code as tidy as possible is the use of something called cascading style sheets. Among other things, cascading style sheets (or CSS for short) help you reduce the repetition of code that might otherwise be required when you have a particularly repetitious design style on your pages.
Examples of such styles might include common fonts for headings, subheadings and links throughout the site.Another advantage (in addition to the reduction of your website source code) of using cascading style sheets and storing all of your styles in the one file is that it gives you the facility to quickly and easily alter just the one file on your website in order to amend the properties of any one element across your entire website. (For example the style of any main heading that appears on your website)
Ordering your website code in an efficient mannerOne thing you need to be aware of is that search engines crawl through your website source code in order to try to understand what each of your web pages is about. They don’t see your design – just the code behind your design. And the higher up within your page source code the relevant content, the easier that search engines will find it to determine that your web page is about a particular topic.
If you have a flashy, involved top section at the top of each of your website pages, then the chances are that there is a great deal of code that is required to make that top section display correctly.
In an ideal website design, your code will get to your main page heading as soon as possible, shortly followed by the body content on your web page. This is the main reason why lots of blogs display their site navigation toward the right hand side of each page. It means that search engines quickly crawl through the post content before they get to the standard site navigation, so there is a greater chance that this page will be ranked higher in search engine results for the body content.
Website navigation for visitors and search enginesIt is of great benefit to you when you tailor your website navigation towards both users and search engines.
Within your website navigation structure you often have categories, subcategories and individual relevant pages within these sub-categories.
If a web page features ‘backwards compatible navigation’, this will allow a person who has reached an individual page in a website, either via a search engine or an external link, to understand where that page fits into the website as a whole. The navigation should provide them with the option of browsing your site and if they can easily understand your structure they will be more likely to visit another individual page within the site.
Figure 2.1 – Trek the UK travel guide
http://www.trektheuk.com/cornwall.php
For example, in figure 2.1, when somebody stumbles upon this page which is about a place called Cornwall in England, they immediately understand where this it fits into the website as a whole. They’re therefore much more likely to continue to browse through the website.
This associated navigation also helps search engines by showing them the topics that are associated with the page, therefore justifying why the search engine should rank the page as more relevant for a particular topic.
Home > Places to go > England > Southwest England > Cornwall Home > [Category] > [Sub-category] > [Sub-sub-category] > [Individual page]
A visitor can quickly familiarize themselves with the website and navigate through the different categories.
Another helpful pointer for search engines is to include the keyword phrases within a text link that points to a page. This keyword phrase in the link needs to reflect the content on the page that the link points towards – and not the page on which the text link resides.
For example, if you wanted to link to a page which was about ‘French language courses’ and you linked to that page with a text link that contained the words ‘French language courses’, this would be assisting with the search engine optimization of the landing page.
This is another reason why in the example above, the text ‘England’ and ‘Southwest England’ is used within the navigation links. It greatly assists with the search engine optimization of the landing pages.
Onsite optimizationThere are 8 essential aspects of onsite optimization. These are things that you should be aware of and should instruct your website designer to design your site in a manner that appeals most to search engines.
1. Page TitleYour page title can be found in the (commonly blue) bar at the very top of your website browsing software. (i.e. Internet Explorer / Firefox / Safari etc)
In figure 2.2, the page title text in the blue bar says “The internet marketing strategy specialists – Purple Internet Marketing”.
Figure 2.2 – Purple Internet Marketing
The ‘Page Title’ text can be found in the blue bar at the top of this screenshot
The Page Title serves the dual purpose of helping your users understand what the page is about, as well as providing search engines with a keyword phrase inside the Page Title.
It is important that your site should use different Page Titles on individual pages in order to optimize each page on your website. This will enable individual pages to be found by a search engine. Failing to do this will have a detrimental effect on your web page rankings in search engines.
When search engine results are displayed the Page Title is the link that is underlined. By making the page title as relevant to the search as possible, the searcher is more likely to find what they are looking for and click through to your website.
Of course the Page Title must explain to people exactly what is on each page too – otherwise you’re your new website visitors aren’t going to hang around too long.
2. Meta DescriptionAlthough the meta-description isn't generally thought by search engine optimization professional to be part of the search engine ranking algorithm, this meta tag can still significantly positively impact your search engine result view to click conversion rates.
To view the meta-description you can enter an individual web page and right click to select ‘view source’ or ‘view page source’. This enables you to see the code behind the individual web pages and near the top you are most likely to find the meta-description.
View of the page sourceThe meta-description viewed as highlighted in figure 2.3 begins ‘Business Articles – Latest business news & management advice’.
At the time of writing if you search Google for ‘business articles’, the number one result is the website www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz. (Figure 2.4) When you view the descriptive text underneath the clickable title you will see that the text used in the description has been taken from the meta-description.
Figure 2.4 – Google Search
Searching Google for ‘business articles’
This shows why conversion rates from a user viewing a search engine result to the user deciding to click through to the website can be significantly improved. If you manage to include a meta-description in the search results which is extremely relevant to the users’ search then it is much more likely that the user will decide to click through to the website.
Note: If you decide not to use a meta-description in your website coding, or if a search engine deems your meta description to be irrelevant compared with the content on your page then the search engine may instead decide to use some alternative content from within your page as the description with the search result. This is generally extremely unfavorable when it comes to trying to improve your conversion rates.
Remember – you do not need to incorporate the keyword phrase within your meta-description – this probably won’t influence search engines. The most important thing is that you tailor your meta-descriptions towards users and trying to persuade users to visit your page without being misleading.
It is fairly simple to ensure that your meta-description is different for each page on your site. If you are using a content management system, you can commonly generate the meta-description automatically, potentially from the first few lines of your main page content. However, ideally it is good to have the facility to include manual meta-descriptions with each page. In addition to individual page titles, this will significantly improve your conversion rates from search engine result (SERP) pages.
3. Heading TagsHeading tags should appear either side of a heading within a page. For example the heading in figure 2.5, the home page of www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz is ‘Latest business articles’.
Some hidden tags behind the source code of that heading explain to search engines that this is an important heading, and therefore that provides a very good indication to search engines about the content on the page.
If you view the source code behind the page (View > Source in Internet Explorer) you will be able to see the heading tags in the source code. Heading tags consist of text enclosed by <Hx> where x is a numerical value from 1 to 6, with 1 being the most important of headings.
For main headings like ‘Latest Business Articles’ (the heading shown in figure 2.5) the code generated will look like:<H1>Latest Business Articles</H1>
www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz
Remember, the purpose of heading tags is to help explain to search engines what your page is about. If you have your keyword phrase within the heading tag, it is more likely that search engines will consider that your page is likely to be about your keyword phrase topic.
4. ‘ALT’ Tags‘ALT’ tags are alternative text that appears if an image does not display properly. Sometimes if you hover over an image with your mouse the ‘ALT’ text will be displayed. ‘ALT’ tags originated in the 1990s when Internet pages were slow to load because of dial-up connections. The text appeared instead of the image, describing what the image was. Users could then click on this text to download the image if required.
However, ‘ALT’ tags now have several additional uses. They can be used to help to explain to search engines what your pages and images are about, again helping your site ranking. Additionally they provide a route into your website when people are searching for images using Google Image Search or MSN Image Search. If you have ‘ALT’ text associated with each image it is more likely those images will appear in search results, increasing the traffic to your site. ‘ALT’ tags are also beneficial for visually impaired people who use software to read pages out loud. If you have text that explains what images are, it assists the software and makes your site more accessible, also giving your site greater compliance with certain web standards.
5. Keyword Rich NavigationWithin your website, you should be linking to different pages using keyword phrases. The keyword phrase should reflect the content of the page that you are linking towards. For example, if I am linking to a page about change management articles, ideally, I want to be using the text, ‘change management articles’ within the text link to that page. (Figure 2.6)
Figure 2.6 – BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz
An example of keyword rich navigationAbove, the orange ‘Change Management Articles’ text link links to the page which can be seen in figure 2.7.
Figure 2.7 – www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz
The ‘Change Management Articles’ page
In figure 2.7, there are aspects that optimize this page for the ‘Change Management Articles’ keyword phrase. You can find the phrase ‘Change Management Articles’ within the page title, heading tags, page content and links towards that page.
6. Good URL FormatThe URL does not really impact search engine optimization a great deal, but it is important to have a consistent URL structure within your website that search engines can follow.
Some websites have their pages generated from databases with long URLs that aren’t consistent because they change depending on which users are visiting your website and what they are looking at. This isn’t good, as search engines will find it hard to determine which URL is the correct one and which one should be ranked.
Just remember that if you make things easier for search engines then they are less likely to come up with an excuse not to rank your web pages as highly as they might otherwise be ranked.
There is often no need to have lots of question marks and different query strings within a URL. Try and make them as simple as possible. For example, the following formats of URLs are ideal:
www.buildyourownbusiness.biz/change-management-articles
(category URL)
www.buildyourownbusiness.biz/change-management-articles/what-is-changemanagement
(page URL)
Many websites link to their homepage within their own site by using /index.html at the end of their URL. The reason that website designers do this is that this the way to tell your internet browser to load a particular page as the first page when somebody visits your website.
However, all you need to do is link to your home page using your main domain name for example www.buildyourownbusiness.biz, instead of
www.buildyourownbusiness.biz/index.html. You should also ensure that you are consistent with your choice of whether or not you use ‘www.’
Using more than one format of link for the same page could dilute the impact of your linking structure. If you have links within your site using one format, but have links from other websites in a different format, then it can reduce the popularity of your homepage with search engines.
(i.e. if you link to your homepage using www.yourdomain.com/index.htm from within your site yet other sites just use www.yourdomain.com)
The reason that you should just stick to the one format of link is because search engines are less likely to rank your site highly if they are not able to recognize how popular your site actually is. In addition, as a worst case scenario from these duplicate styles of linking, search engines may think that these two different pages offering duplicate content. This means that they may choose to de-rank one of these pages completely because they think you are offering duplicate content on your website.
8. Use ‘No Follow’ tags where appropriateThe final aspect of on-site search engine optimization that I’d like to include here is the use of ‘No Follow’ tags within your linking structure.
‘No Follow’ tags enable you to tell search engines ‘Don't rank this page’ or ‘Don't rank these pages’ because they are not important.
Pages that you do not want to be ranked in search engines should make use of the ‘No Follow’ tag, for example the ‘about us’, ‘disclaimer’ or ‘terms & conditions’ pages within your website. There may well be lots of pages within your site that you do not want search engines to include in their results pages.
By deliberately diverting search engines away from certain pages, search engines are more likely to focus their efforts on determining what the rest of your site is about and rank the rest of the pages in your site more highly.
The format of a ‘No Follow’ tag looks like:<a href=http://www.buildyourownbusiness.biz> rel=“nofollow”>About Us</a>
If you are constructing a simple HTML link, and you don’t want search engines pass any credence to the page that you’re linking towards, you should include the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
More site architecture tipsMake sure that you stick to one precise topic per page. It is not just one keyword phrase per page, but it is one relevant, precise topic per page that is relevant for users. This will make life as easy as possible for search engines – so you’ll have a good chance of getting a high search engine result – and getting a high conversion of users clicking through to your pages – and those visitors staying on their site because they’re immediately aware of the precise nature of the page.
Have a logical progression within as well as within your individual pages. (Remember the navigation in figure 2.1) This will encourage users to progress through your site after stumbling upon your page through a search engine result page.
Less is often more when it comes to conversion rates. You may want to minimize navigation on some pages and give people less options. This in turn drives your website visitors towards the one option that you really want them to choose.
Precise relevance of each pageEach page within your website needs to be extremely relevant. Why not survey your visitors and ask them how you can improve your website? This may help you reduce the amount of visitors who leave within a few seconds of arriving – thinking that your site is not relevant for their needs.
You’ve done the hard work when you get visitors to visit your website after finding your pages listed in search engine result pages. Don’t uncoil your efforts by making your site seem irrelevant for you visitors’ needs.
Your web pages should be designed for your visitors – with search engines in mind. Don’t overload your pages with keyword phrases or make your visitors have to scroll to read the content that they are looking for. The best optimized web pages don’t look ‘optimized’.
Improving conversion ratesImproving conversion rates should be another imperative area of focus within website design. You need think about what your goals are for an individual visitor in addition to how you will measure your goals. Do you simply want people to leave a name, an email address, and get them to fill in a form? These types of goals are the easiest to measure.
Other goals you might have include – selling something; tracking free downloads; tracking link clicks or tracking pages viewed to name just a few.
Many businesses will want to capture contact details of visitors e.g. name, email address etc. An important though is that you shouldn’t rely on search engines forever for free traffic in you business model, as your website might not be ranked highly by Google or Yahoo or MSN forever. You should aim to build an email list in order to reduce your reliance on search engines in the future.
A final important aspect of improving conversion rates is to test different sales techniques. Software programs such as AWeber and Google AdWords will let you display different versions of the same page and test alternative versions against each other. You can test your headings on your pages, your descriptions, or even the text within a button. This will help you to produce the optimum versions of your copy.
Perhaps you don’t need all the information that you’re requesting your visitors for? Maybe you’ll treble your opt-in rates if you just ask for name and email address instead of asking for name, email address and physical address.
Ideally, you need to be testing all the time. Once you find a winning page, you should keep it but continue to test and tweak it to see if you can further improve conversion rates.
Pillar #2 – Website Design Summary• Take some time to think about your behind the scenes coding – make your whole website as efficient as possible, which will help search engines when they crawl through your site.
• Get your navigation structure right and make sure it's logical for search engines and individual users.• Remember that your website visitors may land on an individual page via a search engine and good navigation will allow them to quickly understand where that page is in relation to the rest of your site. This will make your new visitors more likely to stick around for longer.
• Ensure that you’re aware of the 8 essential aspects of onsite optimization which will help to improve your search engine rankings.• Have you considered the precise relevance of each page? Having just the one topic per page will make life easier for both visitors and search engines.
• By undertaking continuous testing and analyzing what does and doesn’t work, you can alter the structure of the site to maximize conversion rates.