Good to Know

SEO Friendly Design

ASMART Solutions is a creative team that specializes in Custom Web Design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services in Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). In web design we design sites for our clients using latest web development tools and do website analysis as part of the SEO Process.  In web design and development, the structure of your website is very important when it comes to making your site Search Engine (SE) friendly and also user friendly. 

A Search Engine (SE) friendly site is a site that enables the Search Engine crawlers to access all your site’s pages with ease and possibly include all the crawled pages in the Search Engine’s (SE) index.  If all your pages in your site are indexed then certain pages can certainly show up in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) for targeted keywords or key phrases. 

As part of our website analysis, we need to examine whether or not your site has spider-friendly navigation since spiders have trouble following graphical navigation menus. This means that there must be some sort of text navigation menu that a web crawler can follow, i.e. a footer navigation menu or text links. To determine if a link is plain text (one that a spider can follow), see if it will let you highlight individual letters of the word. If not, it is probably an image or JavaScript.

User friendliness also known as usability is designing websites that are more efficient to use i.e. it takes less time to accomplish a task, easier to learn and more satisfying to use for both regular and new visitors. In our web design and development process we ensure that we create;

• A site that Is easy to navigate and accessible to all pages for users especially new users.
• A site that loads faster since many internet users are normally impatient with slow load times. This is can be accomplished by the use of quality content rather than the less important graphics, images and flash which consume a considerable amount of your bandwidth.
• A site structured according to content and theme where the main ides is to separate content into different pages by topic (Keyword phrase) within your site

Another great way we ensure our clients sites are Search Engine (SE) and User friendly is by the creation of sitemaps.  A site map (or sitemap) a typically hierarchical fashion document in any form that contains a list of all web pages in a site.  Site maps (or sitemaps) are very important in structuring you site by ensuring your site is accessible to both crawler and users. They are normally used in:

• Sites that have very many internal links and pages because they act as navigational aids by providing an overview of a site’s content at a single glance for regular and new  site visitors.
• Sites that utilize Adobe Flash and JavaScript for their navigational links to access content instead of the widely used HTML text.
• The Search Engine Optimization of site as most Search Engines (SE’s) will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of internal links is very large, the site map may be required so that the Search Engines (SE’s) can access all content on the site.

A site with many pages In general ranks better than a site with just a few pages, all other factors being equal. Loosely stated, it is better to have a 20-page site with short pages than a 5-page site with long and flowing content (Page). As part of our web design process we always recommend that each web page should however have a minimum of 200 words per page to maximize relevance with major Search engines.

We create web pages that are simple, devoid of gratuitous animations, junk graphics, large image maps, JavaScript, or anything else that may get in the way of Search Engine crawlers or, more importantly, of your customers getting the message you are trying to convey. Inclusion of <H1>, <H2> header tags as headings and sub-headings not only will it help your visitors read your pages by providing visual separators. It will give your individual web pages and the entire site more relevance with major Search Engines.

At ASMART Solutions our focus in the web design process is creating pages full of high quality, unique, keyword-rich content which we consider as a must. We don’t create pages that are identical or nearly identical as Search Engines might remove your site from their index as they consider it duplicate content. In some cases you might have a document in HTML and PDF forms, Beware that Search Engines will index both.

To prevent this, we create a robots.txt file also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of your site. Simply it specifies which directories and file types to exclude from crawling. If your PDF files are duplicates of your HTML files, we put all the PDF files in a different directory that is excluded from crawling.

In conclusion, ASMART Solutions mainly focuses on designing sites that have a clear navigational structure to enable Users access the sites pages efficiently and effectively. We also create a non-bloated code and clear site structure for the Search Engines to crawl your site with minimal difficult and possibly update their indices. All these are part of our SEO Process we do to sites of our esteemed clients to enable them obtain highly targeted traffic, retain customers and ultimately increase their Return on Investment (ROI).