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This article explains how to plan and design a website that is search engine friendly and has the potential to rank well.

First and foremost, do not design your website strictly for search engines.  I realize this sounds contradictory coming from a search engine optimization specialist, but a new age of search engine optimization (SEO) is dawning.  SEO is becoming more of a traditional marketing industry everyday, because Search Engines ranking algorithms are becoming more sophisticated everyday.  In the beginning, your site could rank well by simply optimizing your meta-tags.  Now, search engines use over 100 ranking factors in their algorithm, and many of these factors have nothing to do with the content of your website. 

So, how should you design your website? 

First, focus on your customers and what they want.  Make your site easy to navigate, use a consistent color scheme, and use colors and graphics to help lead your customers through the site.  For example, if you are designing an ecommerce site then make your Add to Cart buttons nice a big… make it easy for the customer to do what you want them to do.
 
Then, design your site to be readable by search engines. 

1. Make sure there is a text based navigation system on your site, even if it has to be at the bottom of your site via a sitemap.

2. The text content of your site should be readable by search engines.  Text hidden in Flash, JavaScript, or Images cannot be read by search engines.

3. Structure your site like a pyramid.  This means that your homepage links to the main sections of your site, then the main sections link down to the inner pages.  The following graphic depicts a typical pagerank 5 website. 

4. Make proper use of internal linking.  When writing the content for your site, if you mention a word or phrase that is discussed in more detail on another page within your site, then link that word or phrase to that page.  The links in the first paragraph of this article are “internal links”.  This graphic depicts an internal link.

5. Include a sitemap page.  A sitemap is page on your website that has text links to every page on your website.  Typically, the link to the sitemap is at the bottom of a website and it is included on every page within your site.

6. Do not use a splash page.  A splash page can be devastating to your search rankings for several reasons.  Plus, studies have shown that customers will frequently leave a website if it has a splash page.

7. Use “alt” tags in your images.  This is not only good for search engines, but it is essentially for usability.  Screen readers, used by the blind, make use of image alt tags to help the user read the web.

8. If you must have drop down menus, then use css based drop down menus.  A JavaScript drop down menu will not be readable by search engines.

9. Do not use frames.  Google and other search engines have trouble indexing sites that use frames.  If your web page uses 2 frames, the search engine will view those 2 frames as 2 separate pages.  This means that user may find your site, but they will only find one frame, because that is how the search engine saw it.  Your user will leave immediately. 

10. Try to use static URLs that contain the keywords.  Search engines can read dynamic URLS, but a static URL that contains important keywords will suit your site better and help you rank higher.  A dynamic URL about huffy bikes would be yoursite.com/index.asp?id=3&size=kids&brand=huffy.  A static URL about bikes would be yoursite.com/huffy-bikes.asp.

1. Advice: if the pages of your site already have decent rankings, do not rename the URLs.

Conclusion
While it is important to make your site readable and friendly for search engines, a surprising amount of your traffic and conversions will ultimately come from other sources.  Plus, even if someone finds your site through a search engine, will they buy anything or request service? 

On the other hand, the design of your site does not have to suffer in order to make it search engine friendly.  An experienced web designer can blend HTML, CSS, and graphics and create a stunning website that is both user friendly and search engine friendly.  This is the happy medium that you must look for.