Communicating Effectively with Your Web Developer - Teach the 7 Basics
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I could easily go into specifics and make this list many times longer than this, but to a web developer who doesn’t deal with search engine optimization every day, these are the basics that you should communicate to him clearly.
Here are 7 basics:
Text contentSince text is what is read by humans and search engine spiders alike, this is the most important thing you should have on your site. For a web developer who wants to develop, or has been told to develop, a site in all Flash or with nothing but images, it is important that you steer him the other direction. What you are attempting to do is to make him understand your perspective, and that a site can still look great while having text. Make sure that you have keywords and phrases planned ahead of time, and build your content around them.
Small images with alt tagsEvery website has images. Let’s face it, the internet would be a boring place without them, not to mention that a picture is worth a thousand words, yadda yadda…Humans are visual animals. We are great at visualizing in our heads, but we prefer not having to do that. What we must do as SEO's, when communicating with the web developer, is that even though people want to be visually stimulated (which, by the way, the developer understands perfectly), search engine spiders are not motivated by images whatsoever. That is why they need to utilize that “alt” tag. This tag will clue the spiders in on what the image is about.
We must not get carried away, however, and put a whole bunch of keywords into that “alt” tag. Some search engines disregard this tag altogether, due to unscrupulous webmasters that practice keyword stuffing, so images should never replace what good text content should be saying. Images should be kept to a size under 15KB. Yes, there are still those folks out there that use a 56.6K modem, and may not ever go with broadband.
Easy to read textAvoid silly fonts that might look really great in your HTML editor, but are unreadable on the internet; also avoid busy backgrounds that obscure the text. If site visitors have to slow down to interpret your text, you’ve just lost an audience. Search engine spiders take note of the way text is laid out on a page.
Headline tags, bold text, and emphasized (or italic) text are important to readers and search engine robots alike. If your text is so small that people have a hard time reading it, you should also consider that the size of the font may bear some weight with search engines. Some spiders are programmed in such a way that 8 pixel fonts are seen as less important as 12 pixel fonts. Further, placement of text on a page is important as well. If your spiderable content is in the last one fourth of the page, there is a good chance that this will be regarded as not important content also.
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