Web standards and SEO

In today’s market, we are no longer designing for just the user and the browser. We need to design for the search engines, too.

Not only do we need to know how to code properly, but knowing a thing or two about search engine optimisation and marketing is also a must. We don’t need to be experts in the field of SEM/SEO, but do need to be aware of how we as designers can affect client’s search engine marketing. If you’re not familiar with the world of web standards, it’s nothing more than writing valid code.

How many times as a designer have you sat in front of several different browsers exclaiming, “Why can’t they all work the same?” So what do standards have to do with SEO/SEM?

According to The Web Standards Project, “Complying with web standards can give your web pages greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately.” This is accomplished by using XHTML and CSS to separate the code from the content.

Search engines are growing smarter by the day. Here’s an example: they know, when indexing pages, that something placed in a H1tag is important. This is where knowing a thing or two about SEO comes into play. By placing your client’s targeted keyword phrase in a H1 tag instead of using an image, you’ve just increased their chances of ranking better with search engines. Here’s the good part for designers: because you’re using CSS and XHTML to separate content from code, you can replace their H1 text with an image. The nice thing about using this technique, and what makes it a popular choice for search engine optimisation, is not only that this accomplishes the goal of having text available for the search engines, but the designer gets to use a pretty image and it accessible to people who use a screen reader to surf the internet.

Although there’s a lot to learn in the field of SEO/SEM for designers to become conversant, if you want to improve your offerings to clients, it’s worth it. Although it may not be as sexy as Flash or Ajax, it’s still an important tool to have in your arsenal.