Designing for the search engines

Essential website foundations

Here's a surprise: the first thing that each page of your website should do is conform to web standards. A good web designer should be able to manage it, but most don't, which really is a surprise because it's not hard to do.

I'm fanatical about web standards because I understand how absolutely critical it is to a search engine's ability to understand, rank and index the pages of your site. Head over to the W3C's on-line validator and enter the address of a web page. You'll soon discover if the page validates.

I'm passionate about ensuring that web pages do validate. I'm also passionate about using semantic mark-up so that the content of your site ‘explains itself’ to any automated internet process. These two, in combination, are essential foundations for your website. Ignore them at your peril.

Consider the local geography

If the physical location of your business is important, then it should be put on the map - specifically Google Maps. This may not be relevant to all businesses, but it is if your business operates in a specific location or if you want people to physically make contact with you.

In these cases, getting your business registered on Google Maps is important. So is having a Google map on your website. At the least, people will be able to generate a route map to your front door.

If necessary, the pages of your website can even be tagged with a geo-location co-ordinate - one more way of helping automated processes understand your business.

Serving it all up

Once all of the above has been attended to and your site has launched, then some other details need dealing with:

• your site should be submited to Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines
• a free Google Webmaster account should be created and Google should be told which country it should target your site at
• a free Google Analytics account should be created and the pages of your site should be linked to it - giving you astonishingly useful statistics about who visits which pages, when, from where and for how long, etc.
• the submission of an XML-format site map to Google should be completed - to help guarantee correct indexing

The eye of the beholder

To clarify: even though everything beneath the surface of your website needs to be put together with scrupulous regard to the technology, this need not compromise the appearance of your site. With that, everything is possible.