Two things to consider when designing a homepage

When a visitor arrives at your website they are generally looking for information. Different visitors may be looking for different types of information, but they will all be looking for information. The visitor will generally have a quick glance at your home page and decide whether the site has the information they require. If it is not easy to find the information that they need then they will return to the search engine or directory where they found your site and try the next site.

The first factor to consider when designing a home page is how you structure the information. Since most visitors arrive at the homepage prepared to spend a few seconds searching for the information they want, your home page has to provide a guide to the information that is contained in the rest of your site. This guide has to be structured in such a way that a user can find, at a glance the section of your site that contains the relevant information.

The second implication is the look of your site. Although the structure of the information is of primary importance this does not mean that you can ignore the look of your site, especially if it is a business site. The visitor will make a judgement on the credibility and professionalism of your company based on the quality of your website. There for it is important that the design of the page promotes a professional image.

So when designing the home page you want to consider all the information that your site will contain and design your home page so that it provides a brief overview of the information in each section of your site. When deciding on a look for your site it is important that it looks good, without being over cluttered with bells and whistles. It is generally better to use a conventional approach to the navigation. For example you can use Flash to create navigation with different animation affects, but you need to ask yourself will a visitor wait several minutes for the Flash plugin to download before they can use the navigation. Another drawback with Flash is a search engines may not be able to follow the links created in Flash.

Search Engine Optimisation basics

This article introduces you to the basics of search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is a two-step process. The first step involves understanding how search engines view websites. The second step is using this knowledge to optimise your site so that it appears in the first few entries for a specific search. Essentially those are the two main steps in search engine optimisation.

How search engines work

Search engines provide access to the information available on the Internet. A search engine uses three basic mechanisms:

Discovery – this is how search engines find websites. The discovery process is performed by a piece of software, known as a bot, spider or crawler, which searches through web links.

Storage – this is where links, page summaries, and related information on websites are stored. The servers that hold this information are known as index servers.

Ranking – the ranking system is used to evaluate how important web pages are.

To effectively optimise a website you will need a good understanding of Discovery, Storage and Ranking.

Discovery

Search engines need to discover your website before they can index it. If you want the bot to easily find your website, you need inbound links to your site. Inbound links are links on existing websites that when clicked take the user to your website. When your website is discovered the search engine will store information on your site.

Storage

The search engine’s bot gathers and stores information on your website by indexing the words on the home page and following all the links to determine the pages that make up the site and the words on the pages. As well as the words on the pages the bot examines the meta tags in the sites code. Meta tags are given special consideration by search engines when finding out the nature of your website.

There are a variety of meta tags but the most relevant for SEO are the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag. The “keywords” meta tag lets you list key words, relevant to the content of your site, separated by commas. The key words to include are those you would expect a user to type into the search engine when they are trying to find the information your site provides. For example a web design website may use the following keywords:

web design, web site, SEO

The description meta tag is where you enter a description of your site that tells the search engine what your website is all about. For example:

Web Design Scotland

The search engine stores the information it discovers about your site, so when a person enters a query, the search engine searches its information store and returns a list of sites it thinks are relevant.

Ranking

When search engines return the relevant results for a query, they use a sites rank to determine the order in which to displays the results. Google uses the PageRank algorithm to determine a sites rank. The exact nature of how the PageRank algorithm works is secret, but it is alleged that Google’s page rank is based on more than 100 variables. Although the main concept is, a page ranks more highly based on the number websites linking to it, and the higher these sites rank the more weight their link is given.

Making things easy for the search engines

Now that you have a basic understanding of how search engines work, you can take steps to promote your website. The place to start is with your website design.

Designing with SEO in mind

The text is far more important than fancy graphics where SEO is concerned. Although the visual design of your site is important when the people get there. When creating a website that is search engine friendly the first thing to remember is people use the Internet to find information. If your site has no useful information then people will have no reason to visit. When writing the content of your site, find out the key words that people will use to find your site and use them in the text, but remember that the text must still makes sense.

When you have created good informative content, then you can consider the navigation and links. For linking, text is also more important than graphics. Use text or a combination of text and a graphic for links. Links using graphics only can be difficult for search engines to spot.

Getting your site listed

If your site has a number of inbound links from high traffic websites then it likely that your site will get listed on the search engines without to much trouble. If you have just designed a new site, the first step is to manually submit your site to the search engines. You can manually add a your site to Google by going to http://www.google.com/addurl/. When you have submitted your site to the search engines the next step is to get it listed on directories.

Directories work in a similar way to the yellow pages; they list your site under a specific category. There are a number of directories where you can submit your site. Some directories will charge for a listing, but others are free. Getting your site listed by a directory provides a link back to your site, and so improves your search engine ranking.

Another way to increase links to your site is reciprocal linking. This is where you offer to add a link from your website, to a site with content that compliments your site, and in return you ask that site’s Webmaster for a link back to your site.

Adding fresh content to your website

Continually adding fresh content is important for keeping your search engine ranking. Popular ways of doing this are adding a blog, articles page or a news page to your website. Then frequently updating these pages with fresh content. The search engines will check your site every month or so and when they do they will find the new content.