The architecture and design to each website will play an important role in search engine rankings (SEO Company). A design highlighting creative values and flashy gimmickry may command a big "winner" aspect, but they will hardly ever be readily indexable by the machines employed by search engines (SEO India). One could really end up with a unbelievable site that no one else can find.

Equally, a site with rich content but devoid of any artistic value may not meet all the requirements of Web authors or end users in spite of or else unbelievable search rankings. These many reasons, Web authors should take extraordinary care when designing their sites to make sure that they will be easy to get to all users - mechanical or human.

Since a thorough discussion of design (SEO Company) could easily fill an encyclopedia, this document will simply provide a list of design considerations along with simple rationale for each.

Design Checklist
  • Offer a site map with links that point to essential parts of the site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, break it into separate pages. These help search engines locate all of the content on a site.
  • Make sure each page is reachable by at least one static link. If a search engine cannot find your document, it will never show up in a user inquiry.
  • Keep URL's simple and static. Complicated URL's are difficult for people to type and hard to remember. Additionally, longevity is a factor in search ranking (more on this later...).
  • Keep the site hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each page should only be one to three clicks away from the home page. This aids both humans and machines in navigating the site.
  • Avoid the unnecessary use of frames as search engines (SEO Company) often have difficulty indexing them correctly.
  • Minimize the use of Macromedia flash as well as Java applets (SEO Company). Although they can add useful demonstrations and animations to a site, they are not indexed by search engines.
  • Since dynamic page content is expected to change frequently (SEO Company), the relevance to search keywords will probably not be maintained. Moving content to static pages will improve indexing and lighten the load on the Web server.
  • Make sure internal pages link to the homepage to aid navigation.
  • Organize (SEO India) content by topic and divide the site into logical sections, each focusing on a given topic. This allows search engines to better target specific information relevant to keyword searches.