Web Design And Search Engine Marketing

We at Kosmos Central, a Portland web design company, engage in the best practices available to the industry. Our comprehensive, proactive utilization of custom web design, ecommerce, RMS ecommerce, custom web development and services, and web marketing, is as dynamic as the city of Portland, Oregon itself.

Good web design requires a comprehensive approach that builds on the synergy between strong information hierarchies, intuitive navigation systems, logo identity, graphic web design that pushes concepts while supporting content, and a marketing strategy that empowers a site by linking it to users in a sustainable way that maintains a good ROI. What follows is a brief outline of best practices for web design.

Text and Navigation
Because 99% of website communication is accomplished by content itself, it’s incredibly important that a site’s text and menus be clear and concise.

1. Website navigation should be as intuitive and consistent as possible.
2. HTML is a preferred system of navigation; it’s more widely supported than flash menus and can be easily crawled by search engine spiders.
3. Breadcrumb trails coupled with a strong menu system will make a site eminently navigable.
4. An xml or text-link site-map is essential

Internal Linking
Links should always use descriptive text that directly references content they link to. This builds key-word or key-phrase credibility, enhancing the site’s value with search engines when determining page rank.

Images
Images should always have an “alt tag”. In addition to helping people who are visually impaired experience your site, it creates value for that image in the eyes of search engine spiders. As well, graphics and images should be optimized to achieve the best possible balance between quality and size.

What to avoid:

Frames
Using frames is only functional in a limited sense, as spiders can only index the first frame in a set and additional pages within subsequent frames become utterly invisible.

Flash Pages
It’s far better, from almost every perspective, to focus primarily on your site’s content, as search engines do not index information within a Flash movie.

Table-based layouts
Often table-based designs can create unpredictability within the structure of a site, causing content to be nonsensical to search engines.

By: Alex Skorohodov

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Alex Skorohodov is founder and director of business development for Kosmos Central, a Portland web design company, provider of eBusiness and online solutions from custom web development, design and online marketing services for small, medium, and corporate businesses worldwide.