Adapted from The Search Engine Marketing Kit.

Crawlability—how accessible the site’s pages are to search-engine spiders

Navigability—how accessible the rest of the site is to visitors who enter through any of its landing pages.


6 Tips for Designing Your Site:

1. You’re not just designing for humans; also consider automated web crawlers, or spiders.
     • Improve crawlability by making as many links text as possible.
     • Stay away from special effects in navigation or design around them.

2. Recognize that users come from every possible angle; Web sites don’t have covers and dust jackets. Your traffic will come from:
               • Print promotions.
               • E-mail newsletters.
               • Other Web sites.
               • Search engines.
               • Typed URLs or bookmarks.

3. Keep things simple.
               • The less coding on a page, the better.
               • HTML uses tables. The fewer grids necessary in the design, the better.
               • Use Flash sparingly; it can create search-engine problems.

4. Recognize there are things we can't control.
               • We cannot control typesetting and exact appearance on the user's end.
               • CSS (cascading style sheets) help control text format, but problems may still appear.

5. Think template.
               • SIM sites are built on a half-dozen templates.
               • Each template is custom to a brand and makes production easier.

6. Use web-safe colors.