Web Design & Layout – Website Ranking Factors
Web Design & Layout can be a crucial factor in determining how well your site is ranked. Understanding search engine requirements is the key to top ranking! Although you may not have noticed yourself, there is a considerable difference in using a well designed site & those that seem to have been thrown together as an after thought.
Aside from the added advantages in a well structured site, such as good navigation, search facilities & the use of quality web forms, such as contact forms & subscription forms, there are also important gains to be made in structuring your site correctly.
There is always great debate about what heading tags one should use & more importantly where..? And as is very often the case there are always those keen to offer advice, even when it is wrong! The best advice I can give if you wish to clarify this point is to spend 5 minutes reading about this topic on the W3C.org website. Now to those that don’t know, W3C.org is the accepted industry standard & therefore whilst you may not agree with everything they say, you should for your own benefit at least listen to what they have to say about web design etc.
Using Heading Tags
In a nut shell, they advise the use of only one H1 tag on any page (usually your blog title), this is followed by a H2 tag for the article title & further followed by H3 tags for sub headings within an article, as for quantity..? A couple of H2 tags are accepted but anymore than this is likely to raise spammer flags with the search engines, H3 tags on the other hand appear to be unrestricted in the quantity used (please use common sense), as for weighting value of these tags, H1 is no better than bold text in the body of your article, where as H2 & H3 are currently the most important after your title and are therefore granted a much higher weighting value that just about anything else on your page.
What a recent test revealed with reference to Google & Yahoo ranking factors;
1. Page Title (most important)
2. Heading 2
3. Heading 3
4. Meta Description
5. Meta Keywords
6. Heading 1
7. Body Copy
8. Body Copy – Bold
9. Body Copy – Italic
10. Body Copy – Bold & Italic
11. URL (least important)
Using Text Attributes
Design & layout does not stop with headings, there are also many other attributes that if used correctly can have a huge & beneficial impact on how well your pages will rank, some of these are;
Bold Text - Underline Text - Italic Text - Bold + Italic Text – Image Alt & Title tags
Keywords used with any of these attributes will be given a certain weighting value by the search engines & it is this weighting value that plays a significant role in determining your site or page ranking. These attributes are seen by the search engines as an emphasis on certain words & phrases and therefore you are basically instructing the search engines to focus on them.
Don’t think for one minute that bolding out the text of an entire paragraph will help you rank better, because I promise you, it will not!You will actually get yourself flagged as a spammer & may even get your site de-indexed. These attributes are meant purely as a means of showing what words or phrases you place great importance on such as “keywords” or important “instructions “.
Pay Attention To Sidebars
This is another area that tends to stir up great debate ” The Positioning Of Sidebars“, many of us can recall the early 2000′s where just about every website had a left hand sidebar, it was accepted as the norm, yet somewhere along the line, some bright spark discovered that our friendly little search engine bot / spider will, under normal circumstances, read your page in columns from left to right & top to bottom, this meant that for a site with a left hand sidebar, the full length of the sidebar would be read before ever reaching the content of your article ! This is one of the worst scenarios to happen when your trying to get your pages ranked well with the search engines. Ok it is true that this problem can be dealt with by some extra coding, but the fact remains that not all themes have this extra coding, especially many of the free themes.
Summarize
It is very likely that many of you reading the title at the start of this article; eg ” Web Design & Layout“, would have expected this to be more about how pretty your site is ..? However I hope I have shown you that when it comes to Web Design & Layout, functionality should always take precedence & have priority over aesthetics, after all what use is a beautiful website if your readers cannot find it..?
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Posted by Steve Nickson
on Aug 13 2010. Filed under Custom Layout.
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