Key site design considerations get favorable treatment in a recent article by Jaimie Sirovich in Search Marketing Standard | Summer 2007 magazine, “Search Engine Friendly HTML with All the Trimmings.”

He made interesting points and offered tips on a design of new website – helpful as most webmasters seem to forget they build sites for their users.

We all know an image can be worth a thousand words, but unfortunately search engines can’t read pixels. Jaimie mentions using client-side JavaScript to alter HTML to selectively replace textual portions of the image after it loads to the page – “a process known as text replacement.” Good tip.

CSS is commonly used today and is the best practice to use. It allows all HTML code to be tucked away in a file. To make a change globally on your site you now can make the change in one location. Using CSS also allows the search engines to hit the core content of your site and bypass the code. The only downfall Jaimie pointed out is the use of typesetting. Most computers today are installed with uniform typesetting. If you use a typesetting outside the uniform, users will not see the fonts.

Flash and AJAX can bring your users the most colorful, powerful and astounding design, but if not done properly the site will not be found by the search engines. Simply put, search engines can’t read flash files and search engine spiders can’t understand JavaScript codes. There is a simple solution for Flash: create HTML pages of your flash and allow your users to make the decision to either view Flash or HTML.

AJAX, the new revolutionary design, has widespread use. It’s so dynamic that the page load of an AJAX site is flawless. Houston we have a problem. Search engines don’t understand JavaScript codes like AJAX.

As Jaimie stated,

“Sites built entirely with Flash or entirely with AJAX involve a huge paradigm shift. They do not employ pages for the various elements of a site; rather, they are, more or less, an application embedded on a single page”.

A poster in our Fathom forum is looking for a way to increase PageRank with a site using AJAX. If the case is found to be true, is Google educating the spiders to understand JavaScript? I don’t think so. As a precaution, I think it’s best to use AJAX on your site only in areas that require it.

Bottom line: build your site for your users and with search engine optimization in mind. There are solutions to help your site be search engine friendly even while using techniques that the spiders don’t understand.