Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Step 2

2. Design – Keep it simple

Overcomplicated designs with all the latest bells, whistles, pop-up windows and flash animations are a sure-fire way of guaranteeing poor search performance. Keep it simple.

When used sparingly, Flash animations, JavaScript and other new technologies can enhance your site. Many web sites however flog to death new ‘trendy’ technologies, and at great cost. At the time of writing, very few search engines index Flash content at all. So if you’ve seen a great intro movie on a high-budget, high-profile web site and were thinking of doing the same, think again.

Big name brands can afford to do this because their sites already have a big pull-factor by virtue of their status offline, and the number of sites that link to them online. If you want to build a web site that will attract and retain new potential clients, be very wary of using content that spiders will ignore.

- compatibility.
A great site is also of no use if people can’t see it. Many victims of the dotcom crash were web sites that were only visible to a certain ‘elite’ group of people using the latest version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The gurus at the now infamous Boo.com seemed to think it was fine to exclude everybody using either an Apple Macintosh or Netscape’s Navigator from viewing their site. The rest, as they say, is history.

In stark contrast, UK based holiday booking site Lastminute.com (run by the beautiful Martha Lane Fox) has a simple, yet powerful navigation system coupled with a conservative use of images. They are heading for profit.

Wherever possible, make sure your site can be viewed in all of the most popular browsers, from Mozilla to the latest version of Internet Explorer. Your code should be clean, optimised, and verifiable with HTML versions back to 3.2. Robots like retro. Many of the latest version HTML tags will often be ignored by robots.

- i’m still waiting.
Remember that many of your visitors will NOT have broadband connections to the internet. Dial-up modem connections still account for 94% of UK internet users. Check out the latest government statistics for more details.

Speed is everything. If your homepage doesn’t load within a few seconds you will lose visitors for every extra second that you have to wait. By nature internet users are fickle. Quite reasonably, they won’t wait for your site to load if they have a choice of several hundred other sites competing in your area. Search engines also favour sites that are easy to crawl, so faster is better.