Balancing SEO and Website Design Creativity

The following scenario happens every day:

To many web designers, they want to draw visitors attention and develop many creativity features on the website. The Website owner feels very good and pay for the design. The website owner is likely to find that they need more search engine traffic and want to acquire some good search engine ranking. However, search engine optimizers tell them your website is not able to be indexed by search engines because there are too many creativity features, for example, excessive Javascript, full flash website, etc. To rectify the situation, you must remove all those elements. It creates a dilimmea for the website owner.

On one hand, he wants search engine traffic. On the other hand, he wants an interesting and appealing website. The website owner will ask "God, what can I do?"

Is it true that if you want top search engine ranking, your website must be a boring ,full of text website?

Probably No.

The following provides some recommendation to rectify the situation:

1. Flash Website

Search engines cannot "understand" flash but it does not mean that you cannot use Flash design. To solve the problem, you can use Flash header and put text under the flash header. An example can refer to website of a rapid prototyping company.

Nowadays, many flash has no real meaning to visitors and is for decoration purpose only. In this case, you can make a smaller flash header. If your flash header is trying to deliver a message, you can make a larger flash header to draw attention.

2. Interactive Scripts

You may want to add some interactive feature or picture swapping function on your website via Javascript/VBScript and etc. However, improper use of Javascript can hinder your website being indexed. For example, a garment software vendor embraced all hyperlinks by Javascript. As a consequence, search engines read their homepage only but did not index all their inner pages.

To ensure Javascript does not hinder search engine crawlers, I recommend you using external Javascript technique. Additionally, all important hyperlinks should be presented by basic HTML anchor tag.

3. Link Exchange Page

Some website owners refuse to exchange links with other websites because they think a link page makes their site very odd. How about making your link exchange page in this way? First, write a useful article and then assemble the links into the content. It makes the link page becomes useful for visitors and the links become more natural as if it is part of your content. If a link cannot be assembled into the content, it may mean that your content is very poor or the link partners actually is not relevant to your business. Why do you exchange links with them? Remember, search engines only value relevant 2-way links.

4. Content Management System

Website owners are keen to use content management system (CMS) to update their website becuase it is more easy and faster for them to update their websites.

However, many CMS generate webpages dynamically. It is widely known that search engines have difficulty to read or a tendency to ignore dynamically generated web pages.

I will recommend you must spend time to find a good CMS or a good web host providing CMS that can generate static webpages. Since Omega Plastics, a rapid tooling company starts to use this kind of CMS, all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines. In
the past, only 1 web page can be read by search engines.