For a website to be well designed, it must balance search engine optimization along with a professional design. You need to attract search engine “bots” and regular human users. All efforts, including the design and SEO, are lost if you are not appealing to your website’s average user.
Of course, a compromise between visual effects and text must be reached, because search engines don’t give marks for layout or pictures. And words alone will not grab people’s attention. Although designers hope that adding creative elements to their websites will be productive, such actions can actually inhibit the site’s promotion.
Even though it does not need to be the nemesis of SEO consultants, Flash continues to be so. It is plausible to combine Flash with HTML to come up with a search engine friendly website that will still permit a rich media experience. When designing a website with Flash, create different versions — one for Flash and one HTML (a.k.a. “non flash version”). You can then give your website visitors a choice for which version he or she would like to view. By doing so, you can still have a catchy website for people, and your website will have a better chance to be indexed and ranked through the HTML versions.
On a similar note, a visually pleasing website can be generated by using fancy navigation schemes like JavaScript or flash object menus. Alas, these similar elements also make it hard and sometimes impossible for search engines to correctly crawl the website, limiting the website’s search engine exposure. Don’t throw the entire idea away, though. Some of this can be ameliorated by keeping a good up-to-date sitemap.
CMS-based and dynamic websites: Due to the fact that dynamic web pages are data-base driven and are generated spontaneously, they are generally assigned URLs with very big and odd looking strings in order to organize products and create a central navigation for the visitors to your website. Unfortunately, these parameters make it hard for most search engines to crawl your pages. You want to try to be sure your CMS or designer uses what Wordpress calls “Pretty URLs” (the majority of Content Management Systems today provide this feature – though by a different name most likely.) [Stephen Grisham Sr]
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