Warmest Greetings,

What is the best way to design a site with SEO in mind?  

:: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 ::

Not so long ago, Webmasters weren't too concerned with website designs that would be crawled by search engine robots. Thousands of them had no idea what the difference was between a Directory and a Search Engine. Companies with websites cared more about "putting up a website" than making it a worthwhile website.

Well, times are changing.

Best Layout design for SEO was posted in Cre8asiteForums yesterday. I was happy to see someone ask! What do you think is helpful? Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight") has some pointers, including:

"A design that allows you to present a lot of content without looking cramped, or over-long can help greatly. Search engines often prefer pages that have at least 400 words of text in the body. Some prefer far longer at 600 words plus."

I offered some article links that focus on the combination of SEO and usability too.

Usability

I can't go to the local shopping Mall without thinking about how to make the online shopping experience just as profitable and interesting. While we've made great strides with web design and intuitive software, we have a long way to go to bring the physical senses into the Internet act. Shopping online lacks sound or texture. It lacks humans and all the good and bad that come with being one. Sometimes ecommerce websites lack a way of asking "Did you find what you were looking for?" and many times they simply don't sell because the design is bland or not logically targeted to people.

I recently tested a website for a famous line of sunglasses and found pages and pages of sunglasses styles, but they were all lined up on white web pages. Granted, the styles were very cool. The prices and descriptions were there. But what I wanted was to see what they'd look like on my face. I couldn't try them on via my browser. I would have appreciated it if the company had placed models with various body shapes and sizes, or faces wearing their sunglasses, or sketches of face shapes with various styles of sunglasses on the website. In a real store, sunglasses displays have mirrors so you can see what styles look good or awful on you. For a company selling an expensive line of something to wear, they must be crazy to think a little uninspiring graphic can make customers part with their money without proof it's going to look right on them or the people customers are buying for.

(For more on this subject see Why Ecommerce is Not Ready for My Daughter or Me)

While I know it's imperative to find ways to design online to sell, it's not always practical to mimic brick and mortar versions. In my article I write about how clothing stores pipe in background music. Stores targeting teens want music that's cool. This adds to their shopping experience. I've been known to linger in stores a bit longer just to finish hearing a favorite song. But how do you add sound to an ecommerce clothing store without driving away your customers?

Well, there's the "TaDa" approach. Someone is actually studying this. See Auditory Information Design. I was surprised it was written in 1998!

"The prospect of computer applications making "noises" is disconcerting to some. Yet the soundscape of the real world does not usually bother us. Perhaps we only notice a nuisance? This thesis is an approach for designing sounds that are useful information rather than distracting "noise". The approach is called TaDa because the sounds are designed to be useful in a Task and true to the Data."

Also on this subject is an article by Dirk Knemeyer called From Brick to Click - Bridging the DividePart 1 of 7: Understanding eCommerce

"We have only barely begun to take advantage of the opportunity presented by eCommerce. This is despite the power of broadband connection and the seemingly ubiquitous presence of personal web-enabled devices. Despite visionary and innovative eCommerce companies. Despite the best efforts of traditional companies to best leverage and even transition over to an eCommerce-centered model."

Search Engine Optimization

Remember the thread I mentioned yesterday about whether or not it's "worth it" to remain in the SEO biz? (Is it time to get out of the SEO business?) Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.com showed up and weighed in with his views, as well as many others. It's a great read. Here's some snippets:

Danny Sullivan:
"The even more successful ones understand they need to transition from SEO, pure optimization of web pages, to SEM. They become search engine marketers and understand how to balance both paid and unpaid listings, getting the benefit of both worlds. The really successful ones will brand out into conversion analysis."

Ammon Johns:
"If you ever for a moment thought that SEO was about 'slapping keywords on a page' or about 'random link exchanges' then where on earth have you been? This forum has been telling everyone that all that crap of keyword stuffing and reciprocal links was a doomed shortcut, nothing more than crass corner-cutting, ever since we opened. The people who post regularly in these forums have been saying it far, far longer."

Barry Welford:
"I think there has been a great deal of wise commentary in this thread. I always use SEO to mean Selling Effectiveness Optimization. This includes not only Searchability, but also Saleability (the customer-centric USP approach, etc.), Usability and Credibility. You've got to have them all. High rankings are great but they're only a small part of the equation."

John Scott:
"Brute force SEO always wins out over the gentler, page-elements SEO. If the ability to spam hundreds of blogs and guestbooks is something to be proud of, I'm missing it. In my book, SEO is manual labor."

Ammon again:
"Not just manual labour - it is craftsmanship."

And that, for today, is the final word.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 1/14/2004 10:20:45 AM

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