How to design search engine friendly web sites

Shari Thurow presents some practical hands on advice on designing web sites that rank well in search engines.

Andrew Goodman introduced Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, speaker at the beginners’introduction to search engine friendly design at day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

Shari Thurow

Shari is free a spoken and entertaining speaker and has the impressive ability to make the ins and outs of search engine marketing sound easy. And the fact is that if you follow her advice, you will probably come a long way towards the real target of SEO: search friendly design.

Shari defined search friendly design as user-friendly web site design that can easily be found on the crawler based search engines, human-based search engines (Web directories) and vertical (specialized) search engines.

She is a designer by trade, a usability expert as well as a marketer. She stressed the need to design for people first, the search engines second. In order to determine what is successful design she studies the sites that people are using, that search engines index and directory editors accept.

If you do this, you will see that there are certain elements of search engine optimization that do not change, she said.

The five basic rules of web design

When designing a site you must focus on how you arrange words, images and multimedia files, she argues, and points to five basic rules of Web design:

1. Sites should be easy to read
Everything on your site should be easy to read. If not, people will hit the back button.

2. Sites should be easy to navigate
People are not always coming to your home page. So when they arrive at a page it must be easy for people to find what they are looking for.

3. Pages should be easy to find
Pages should be easy to find in search engines, directories or on industry related sites. People want to go directly to the page they search information for. If they do not land on the right page, they will search for it, but they ought to find it within 7 to 8 clicks.

4. Sites should have consistent layout and design
This applies to the use of white space, color etc. The users must be able to form a mental image of the site.

5. Pages should be quick to download
The majority of a page should download in 30 seconds or less using an old fashioned modem.

At the conference Shari gave several examples of both good and bad design. She pointed to the use of FAQ-pages (Frequently Asked Questions) and demonstrated how it helps visitors to find all the questions over the fold, with links to answers below the fold. In this way people immediately understands what the page is about.

She stressed that contact information should be easy to find, and above the fold.

About Author:
authorUrl: http://www.pandia.com/sew/414-web-design.html
To read more articles on: designing, multimedia, Webmaster, Marketing Director, designing web

View more blogs here : http://www.technoinfonet.com/Blogs