How Design Affects Search Engine Performance

During the website design process, there are a number of technologies and processes to avoid, or at least to limit, when search engine performance matters:

Flash animation, although very visually impressive, can severly hinder a website's search engine performance. Firstly, the text within Flash animation currently can not be read or indexed by any of the major search engines. In other words, the text content within Flash is completely ignored when search engines view the site, and therefore does not contribute to higher rankings. Secondly, Flash animation increases the filesize of the website pages, which in turn slows down the loading process of the page. Filesize is one of the factors currently taken into consideration when the major search engines rank websites, and having a large filesize in relation to the amount of text content can only hurt your chances.

The use of Frames in the construction of each individual page is also something that proves ineffective at achieving high search engine rankings. Search engines very often struggle to index pages designed using this technology, and return unexpected results. Almost everyhting that is accomplished with the use of Frames in a website design can be replaced with proper HTML and CSS (two very effective search engine friendly technologies).

Splash pages (web site intro pages usually containing a Flash animation or large scale image) are normally a favorite of web designers, but are to be avoided. These splash pages, although often visually appealing, do not generally contain a large amount of text. Text content is of course one of the key factors to search engine ranking, and with a lack of text on the first page of your website that a search engine sees it will return a lower ranking than a content-rich website.

The webstart.ca Design Style

You may have noticed from our portfolio that our design style is one of clean lines, strong photography and imagery, plenty of text content, and consistent navigation and layout.

In fact, you also may have also noticed a trend of a horizontal image placed at the top of many of our clients websites, with navigation running down the right side of the page, as opposed to down the left as is normally designed. An image at the top of the page makes a bold opening statement to the website user, as typically the first thing that one sees is the top of the page. The navigation on the right side of the page is done purely for search engine optimization purposes, and allows the search engines to target the content on the page and not its navigation.

webstart.ca wants you to succeed with your business. We measure our own success on the success of our clients, and everything we put into your website is intended to maximize your reputation, professionalism, and bottom line.