Search Engine Friendly Design

Designing a search engine friendly site can sometimes connotate images of bare bones, back-to-basics, esthetically-challenged sites. But this need not be the case. Design is not a science; it's an art and designing a search engine friendly website doesn't have to mean compromising on design and usability. It just means there's yet another ball in the air to juggle in the continuing quest to meet both users' as well as business needs. We all know the old adage 'build and they'll come', and we all know equally well that this is defintely not the case. A search friendly site is about improving your findability in the vast black hole that can be the internet. Some of the ways that this can be achieved are as follows:

- Keywords: ensure your page content includes relevant keywords that can be picked up by the search engines and that users can also quickly find once they arrive on your site.
- User Vocabulary: use words and phrases in your page copy being searched for by your target audience(s).
- Imagery: use alt tags on images as they are indexed by the search engines; however, go easy on the imagery especially as it relates to critical content as you don't want to risk a missed search marketing opportunity.
-Rich Media: Flash is making a resurgence and is better search engine optimizable; but, consider its appropriate usage. Understand how to make your flash movie search engine friendly, how to embed the flash object in your code to improve its indexability, and the overall limitations of flash search engine optimization.
- Code: keep your code clean and well-formed for easier indexing.
- Text: you can't go wrong with plain old html text; so, emphasize it via bolding as this is weighted more with search engines, and add a plain old keyword rich statement somewhere on the page, even at the bottom.

The WebGuild also recently had an event on Advanced Search Marketing and there were some great tips discussed by the panel of experts. See http://www.webguild.org/meetings/archives.php and the related Searchnomics blog post.