“guide to website
design planning & SEO”
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The function of a website is to contain information. Website design can be defined as the skilful creation, presentation and accessibility of coherent information. |
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As a result, take time to plan and develop a linked web of useful contents that a target audience can appreciate and understand.
The process of website planning
is a vital initial and ongoing activity that jointly identifies both the purpose of a website
design and needs of a target audience expressed throughout a planned structure
and web pages contents.
Information contained in a web design ought to be understood instantly and be appealing enough to capture the interest of the public straight away.
Moreover, it must avoid being vague, hinting at, or alluding to matters that can be misunderstood or give rise to confusion.
Consequently,
it’s essential that information should be understood first time round by the
public, especially your target audience, otherwise they’ll move on elsewhere.
Search
engines verify that information compiled by web designers’ measures up to it’s
stated purpose in every respect. Thus, they
assess if contents actually concur with your page title and page
description.
In
view of these considerations, we draw attention in particular to the paths and interdependent
nature of the crucial stages, namely the page title, page description, keywords
and on screen text. Altering any one of them will affect all of the others.
Thus,
this web page is a
beginners or web
designers DIY tutorial and SEO guide for planning any website design so that
contents and information should be understood first time round to fulfil a
planned purpose and target audience needs.
Planning a website design
Being mindful of the path and factors that influence
effectiveness, begin to clarify purpose by
noting all your thoughts, as well as those of all participants.
It’s a huge advantage to identify and note all ideas for further examination. Gradually, you’ll distinguish the most likely useful information to bring into the forefront of the planning development process.
The first step in the
website planning process is to establish objectives. This defines both your planned web purpose as well as
target audience and their needs. These key factors govern and form the basis of
a plan for on screen information, and set the benchmark for the extent of
detail to satisfy end-user requirements.
Fully
examine and decide the reasons why a target audience will want to visit your
website. Then combine these with your objectives to
fully describe your intentions. In the process a useful guide, is to eliminate
everything that doesn’t support the set purpose
or achieve audience expectations.
For example, the prime purpose of our website is to ensure information should be understood first time round, so as to enable both beginners or web designers to plan and create an effective website design from the contents.
In addition, the extent, quality, readability and comprehension of the facts displayed on these web pages, must include and convey detailed search engine optimisation techniques, or SEO know how, so as to achieve top positions in search engine results pages or SERPs.
By definition, search engine optimisation is the course of action needed, to get increased amounts of visits to a website from search engines results pages. As a guide, the earlier a website’s placed in the search results listing, then the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
Being aware of and consciously creating a website in search engine optimisation (SEO) mode, means that
the resulting website design, its web pages and information contents are well thought out and
likely to be understood first time round.
Although a website’s design objective, subject matter and contents volume will vary, nevertheless the same SEO procedures ought to be applied throughout. In so doing it’s vital to plan, then create and edit categories of information that maintain purpose by using specific relevant keywords in all web pages.
Equally important, and during the same process, a web design should be presented in a manner compatible for search engines to read and evaluate. As an integral part of search engine optimisation, this has the effect of eliminating obstacles that would otherwise prevent the true value of your meaning being taken into account.
From the outset, it’s become vital for us to establish and plan the characteristics and standard of information required to fulfil the above specific purposes. For instance, it’s not only necessary to explain precisely what needs to be done, but also it’s necessary to guide web designers and amateurs alike how to put this into practice.
In our case, the sequence and timing as to when relevant knowledge should be introduced is also a factor. And finally, it’s necessary to position informative facts in places where they’re noticed and accessible.
Taking all these aspects into account determines the criterion for on screen text, as well as its variety and required detail. By way of example, our objective requires us to impart complete explicit know how over and above a level that would otherwise fulfil a general grasp of website design and SEO.
Whilst we’ve defined our main intent, we expect some visitors will be looking for a specific piece of reliable information. Consequently, our secondary purpose caters for this expectation too.
Thus, our structure has been planned to act as a multi purpose reference guide tool, to equip web designers or beginners as well, to analyse any current website design or one under development.
The application of detailed planning has enabled us to
combine and fulfil both purposes. Take full advantage yourself to create an
effective domain
name , title ,
description
, and keywords merged
to form contents.
In addition, get the benefit of
putting into practice not only internal
links and anchor text but also alternative
text as well as graphics
navigation because these are all effective SEO techniques.
Above all, we’d say that the most necessary skill to acquire is the ability to understand, develop, organise and manipulate categories of words.
This is because they convey the composition, reasoning
and comprehension of contents. As such, they directly communicate meaning to
information that ought to be understood first time round.
PLANNING website
purpose-the intended audience website
design-plan your structure information-meaning
and the use of words
CONTACT summaries web
searches SERPS
analysis contact
details
Having decided on a planned purpose, relevant topic headings and predicted users, website designers formulate these ideas and interactions by means of a diagram. In effect a visual example of the initial design structure. This then becomes a focal review point from which further proposals can evolve
This diagram conveys the team’s intention or plan strategy at a particular time. From thereon, it becomes a means of communication and acts as a basis for control and catalyst for subsequent planning development.
It not only indicates how potential SEO website information may be mutually linked, but can
also help to decide suitable contents for particular
web pages.
My visual planning display, as used for this website design guide, is reproduced from the original hand sketch. It consists of an assortment of rectangular shapes, to indicate various likely web pages, together with the sub-headings of information that they may contain as well as possible mutual linkages.
At this preliminary stage, the whole point is to bring out all ideas into the open and commit everything into note format. It’s important to include everything and dispel nothing until after due consideration.
This sketch platform performs the role of a visible memory jogger, highlighting about 30 topics. All these relevant components fall within the boundaries stated in the website purpose. Systematically focussing and acting on each subject heading ensures that no key ingredients are overlooked.
Furthermore, this skeleton reference framework can be gradually transposed into becoming meaningful accessible information contained within the web pages. Use this free DIY tutorial reference manual and website designers SEO guide to plan your web pages structure and learn how to create your domain name, title, description, keywords and contents.
I’ve noticed that improvements or amendments have a tendency to become evident, only after a period of time has elapsed. In particular, regardless of much editing, there’s always an elusive word, phrase, sentence or paragraph that slips through the net.
Sometimes it’s apparent too, that what I’ve actually written is not exactly what I meant to say at the time. To rectify matters, my tip is to check your website design and all web pages at planned intervals to consider and identify improvement areas. In the beginning, I’d make a point to review and amend a website every week.
Minor variations such as an alternative text phrase, or different keywords can add to and collectively improve the meaning of a website. You’ll be amazed what can be improved even at this early stage. Later on when things have settled down, say every two months, a planned update review is well worthwhile.
Sometimes, the effect of a planned
appraisal to a website structure can be more severe and warrant the addition or
omission of web pages. Such a plan will require on
screen text information and implicated links to be amended together with the
page title, description and keywords.
However, if the initial planning fulfilled its purpose, the most likely needs are revisions to meta tag page description and page title together with on screen text contents. Equally anchor text links and their description always offer ways to be improved especially when sprinkled with keywords. External links to other websites, also present opportunities for reciprocal linkages and anchor text revisions.
Finally, take the opportunity to reconsider and critically examine your overall web pages layout. For example, can a user see first time round what each page is for, and get an idea of the page contents as well as navigate to other pages.?
Reasons
for storing key website design SEO files
An integral part in the creation of a website design, as well as this guide, is the regular meticulous preparation and systematic storage of planned working files. These impart indispensable information for reference and amendment needs. What is more, it’s self-evident this provision is an important part of web design and the search engine optimisation process.
Since information should be
understood first time round, then any improvement towards this goal by web
designers or beginners to their creations is SEO in practice. As a result,
endemic SEO permeates the contents throughout.
Clearly, when adding to and using filed data, the person responsible for the website is consciously aware of the specific design feature being acted upon and the functions they fulfil. These include page title, page description, keywords, on screen text, graphic navigation and alternative text as well as anchor text links.
For example, we carefully plan the vital off screen ‘meta tag’ for every page title and description from many attempts that we keep stored in our SEO contents files until choosing the one for all separate planned web pages that most fulfils the intended purpose.
However, a valuable guide is to store all your attempts for every website page regardless. This preserves your ideas, that may well dovetail better with future on screen text yet to be developed, or even any subsequent revisions.
The preparation of visible on screen information then commences and involves repeated editing so as to express and maintain purpose, as well as the insertion of anchor text internal links with relevant keywords. Other ways to augment accessibility are to make extensive use of graphics navigation and alternative text .
Using graphics navigation and alternative text is very effective search engine optimisation. However, you’ll need to avoid any subsequent changes of on screen text on the target page without a corresponding revision of any implicated alternative text. Otherwise, you’re directing search engines to read text that doesn’t exist.
This likely difficulty arises after attaching alternative text onto a graphic since this text is not visible thereafter in onscreen contents. Consequently, although the graphic can be seen, the text that you’ve included is invisible. The old adage “out of sight out of mind” aptly sums up the situation.
Nevertheless, website designers can preserve the value of this measure and eliminate any damage by referring to contents files that you’ll need to create. These back up files provide the means and opportunity to counteract this risk from the outset.
Our tried and tested effective solution to pre-empt harm, is to systematically keep a data file record of each involved portion of alternative text as it occurs. Then take appropriate revision action if and when the need arises.
This record should readily identify each graphic together with the page where the link starts at, as well as the target page you’re navigating to. A guide and example of this actual search engine optimisation (SEO) process and it’s role in website design is shown from one of our planned back up word.doc files.
By way of explanation, we’ve used a row of navigation graphics at the top (header) and bottom.(footer) of each
website page. Note that a considerable amount of varied and carefully chosen hidden alternative text is attached to every graphic, as a guide say about 100 words or 200 per page in total.
However, it’s not so much the quantity, but the quality of informative text available on the target page that really counts. Thus you’ll need to create useful information that’s understood first time round, so take a look at keywords and how to use them to produce effective contents.
FROM
HEADER GRAPHICS ON THIS PAGE
TO TARGET PAGE ALTERNATIVE TEXT USED
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This do-it-yourself tutorial
enables high quality web pages to be
developed to suit your subject matter that engage, persuade and inform users
with facts. |
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Keywords
embedded in a domain name, are permanent SEO since they’re ever present in
inbound links,
as well as internal links between web pages. |
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Our
DIY tutorial guide includes detailed
instructions to create an SEO rich website design. This
includes contents, title, description, keywords and domain name. |
FROM FOOTER GRAPHICS ON THIS PAGE
TO TARGET PAGE ALTERNATIVE TEXT USED
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Examine
how to indicate
the contents of your web pages by using a unique page title to reflect the
purpose of the on screen information. |
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Our
DIY tutorial is a complete thorough worked example of reliable website design techniques and search engine
optimisation measures in practice. |
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At
the same time, every SEO rich website design also depends upon effective use
of anchor text, graphics navigation,
alternative text, web pages structure as well as internal and external links. |
Supplementary to the above graphics navigation and
alternative text procedure, you can also learn
how to implement the SEO process known as anchor text page links. Describing a link in this way, should tell people what’s at
the other end before they use it. This arouses interest, dispels confusion and
maintains the theme that’s been brought to their attention.
These internal linkages infuse an interlocking
communication framework of relevant mutual meaning throughout the website.
Systematic records of these also warrant file storage similar to those for
alternative text.
Finally, it’s useful to keep a hard print copy of every page in your website design with all keywords highlighted. Web designers can then check keyword frequency, appropriate repetition and distribution placing as well as meaning and consider suitable alternatives.