Online marketers understand the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). For this reason, they try to rewrite their Title and Meta Tag, seeks ways to improve link popularity. However, they ignore a basic fact: search engine unfriendly web design hurts!

Here, let me mention some poor web design practice in terms of SEO.

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

c. Flash

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website. However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website. In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.

Therefore, you should use Flash intelligently and do not solely rely on web designer’s idea!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 10:14 am and is filed under SEO, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.