Shari Thurow presents some practical hands on advice on designing web sites that rank well in search engines.

Andrew Goodman introduced Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, GrantasticDesigns.com, speaker at the beginners’introduction to search engine friendly design at day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

Shari Thurow

Shari is free a spoken and entertaining speaker and has the impressive ability to make the ins and outs of search engine marketing sound easy. And the fact is that if you follow her advice, you will probably come a long way towards the real target of SEO: search friendly design.

Shari defined search friendly design as user-friendly web site design that can easily be found on the crawler based search engines, human-based search engines (Web directories) and vertical (specialized) search engines.

She is a designer by trade, a usability expert as well as a marketer. She stressed the need to design for people first, the search engines second. In order to determine what is successful design she studies the sites that people are using, that search engines index and directory editors accept.

If you do this, you will see that there are certain elements of search engine optimization that do not change, she said.

The five basic rules of web design

When designing a site you must focus on how you arrange words, images and multimedia files, she argues, and points to five basic rules of Web design:

1. Sites should be easy to read
Everything on your site should be easy to read. If not, people will hit the back button.

2. Sites should be easy to navigate
People are not always coming to your home page. So when they arrive at a page it must be easy for people to find what they are looking for.

3. Pages should be easy to find
Pages should be easy to find in search engines, directories or on industry related sites. People want to go directly to the page they search information for. If they do not land on the right page, they will search for it, but they ought to find it within 7 to 8 clicks.

4. Sites should have consistent layout and design
This applies to the use of white space, color etc. The users must be able to form a mental image of the site.

5. Pages should be quick to download
The majority of a page should download in 30 seconds or less using an old fashioned modem.

At the conference Shari gave several examples of both good and bad design. She pointed to the use of FAQ-pages (Frequently Asked Questions) and demonstrated how it helps visitors to find all the questions over the fold, with links to answers below the fold. In this way people immediately understands what the page is about.

She stressed that contact information should be easy to find, and above the fold.

What the search engines do

Search engines do three things, Shari argued:

1. They index text, so you need a keyword rich text
2. They follow links, so you need to develop page architecture with a strong link component
3. And they measure popularity, which necessitates a high quality external link development

All three components are essential, she said.

The use of keywords

As regards the use of keywords, she pointed to the following essential places to put the most important keywords:

1. HTML title tags
2. Introductory and concluding paragraphs
3. Product/service descriptions
4. Graphic images (in alternative text)

Text in and around hypertext links is very important, as are keyword phrases in headlines.

She strongly recommended the 8 seconds usability text: if visitors can’t identify what the page is about in less than 8 seconds you are doing something wrong.

The link component

Text links are the most search engine friendly, but that should not stop you form using navigation buttons, Shari argued. Test show that graphic images look more clickable and will be clicked on more often than text links.

Image maps will often help human visitors but may be difficult to follow by the search engines. So image maps should be supplemented with regular text links, for instance by the end of the page.

Some menus (form and DHTML), are search engine friendly, some are not (e.g. jump menus), which means that you should consider alternative text links.

If your target audience love Flash, then give it to them, Shari said, but do provide an alternate means of navigation.

Shari felt strongly for contextual links or bread crumbs, as such locational links. They provide a sense of place for the visitor.

She also discussed the use of embedded text links (i.e. links within regular paragraphs). You should never just throw up a press release as it stands without links. Text links stand out as a natural call to action, and you want that.

Still, she warned against embedded text link overkill.

Webmasters should also consider making a site map, according to Shari. However, a site map must function as a way finder, not a simple collection of text link. Add a helpful introduction and put up a call to action on the site map.

Popularity component

The number of links and the quality of links equals link popularity, and link popularity is an important component of the search engine ranking algorithm.

All search engines are measuring click-through popularity, she said, although the search engines are not using it to determine relevancy.

It is very difficult to imitate link development, which is why search engines often are able to identify link farm spam. Needless to say, Shari did not recommend the use of link farms in building link popularity.

Substantial and unique content will bring you links, she argued, but link development is more than acquiring links. A good link contains a keyword rich link text and description.

The quality of links is far more important than the quantity of links.

Site usability

The biggest complaint from web site visitors is lack of navigation or lack of clarity of content.

This is why splash pages are a no no for search engine optimization. If you insist on using splash pages, Shari said, do place user friendly text below the fold.

One site per company or several?

In the following Q&A Shari was asked whether it made sense for a company to develop several sites instead of one.

There are legitimate reasons to split up a web site, she said, for instance in a corporate web site and a shopping web site.

If you target different countries, it makes sense to have different country domains. Accordingly, if you are targeting several very different product or service categories, you may consider different domains. Go to the Yahoo directory or visit business.com. If the products belong to very different categories you can have two separate web sites.

But remember that you are splitting up the link development as well, she said. If your two sites each have 50 links to them, you will loose if your competitor has 100 links, everything else being equal.

But you should not have several sites focusing on the same product. That is a spam penalty waiting to happen.

Look out for the second edition of Shari Thurow’s book on search engine optimization.

More of Pandia’s Search Engine Strategies coverage.