Importance of a Balanced Web Design - Users vs Search Engines

We hear and see everyday about the focuses on web design right now is ensuring that a website is SEO friendly. However, this does not always take into account how USER friendly a website is. If a website is optimized for search engines, it does not mean that it is easy to navigate or user friendly. To ensure that a website is popular and well-received, your web design should strike a balance and I recommend keeping these tips in mind.

Making Your Site Attractive and SEO Friendly

If you only focus on creating a website that is SEO friendly, you are likely to end up with an unattractive website. You don't need to use Flash and widgets, but complementary colors and an appealing logo can go a long way to making a website more visually attractive.

Most web users prefer websites that are clean and minimal, so you don't have to go crazy with images and the like. Still, having an aesthetically pleasing website can go a long way to making people enjoy being on and even returning to your web page. Additionally, using the HTML "ALT" tag for images and naming images based on keyword schemes are key parts of successful SEO strategies anyway.

Brief Tutorial on image ALT and TITLE Tags

When an image is to be displayed, the HTML code for that image must contain directions to the server on where that image is located. The image is then retrieved from that location and displayed in the web browser. The code might read: 

 < img src="pictures/image-keyword_tools.jpg">

NOTE: I had to put a space in between the < and > to ensure the HTML displayed correctly as text, No spaces are required in the actual code.

The tag acts as an instruction to the server to go to the source of the file, in this case, the directory "pictures", find the image called "image-keyword_tools.jpg".

Proper HTML code adds width and height information which allow your browser to hold a properly sized area open so the fast loading text is formatted around the picture while the slower loading image downloads. When those dimensional attributes are missing, the browser has no way of knowing in advance how much space to allocate for an image. Therefore, proper code will format the page in advance for a more professional appearance. An example HTML code will look like this example of a 125x125 pixel banner:

< img src="pictures/image-keyword_tools.jpg" width="125" height="125" >

Now, for the alt and title attributes. They look like this:

< img src="pictures/image-keyword_tools.jpg" width="125" height="125" alt="Web's Best Keyword Tools" title="Web's Best Keyword Tools" >

If you hover over the image below you will see a little text box pop up - look familiar? That's the title text anchor.

Web's Best Keyword Tools

Search engines can only read text. Images with alt tags allow search engines to match the description to the site's content possibly aiding in search engine rankings and more traffic via the "Google Images search".

So, hover over the images in your website.
Do they have the important alt and title text included?

Ensuring Your Website Is Easy To Navigate and Index

Another important part of user friendly website design is to ensure that people are able to navigate your web page. If people have trouble finding ways to contact you or other important information, they are likely to simply leave the site. Even if Google and other search engines can crawl and index your site with no problems, visitors need to be able to do the same.

Be sure that your navigation system is obvious and easy to use. Many webmasters use third-party testing resources to ensure that the layout of a website is simple to understand and that information is easy to locate. If you do not ensure that your website is easy to use, your conversion rate is likely to suffer.

The Importance of Quality Keyword Content

Google and other search engines use a variety of algorithms to check for what they consider to be quality content. These systems usually check for grammar and spelling errors and frequency of keyword use. However, they are not yet able to actually determine if quality content is actually informative or accurate.

This means that you can still create quality search engine content without creating quality visitor content. Having a large number of visitors to your site does you no good if they leave because of poor or incorrect content. This is why you should be sure that your content is well researched and relates to the keywords that you are using. Even if your website is an online store, you should be sure that your product descriptions are helpful and provide as much data to visitors as possible (hence ALT tags:-).

Having a high search engine ranking does not always mean a successful website. While search engine rankings can get visitors to your site, you still need to provide a quality experience to your visitors, web design is one part of that experience.

Be sure to balance your search engine optimization methods with visitor experience optimization, I hope these tips help with your success.