Interactive Web Design And Seo

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Interactive Web Design and SEO must be compatible to work together; otherwise they are mutually exclusive. The best known incompatibility is the use of Flash programming to design a website. Unknowing website owners hire website designers who are not aware or are not concerned with the ultimate objective of almost any commercial website … to make money for the owner. So the best looking website won’t have any business success online if the website is unreadable by the search engines; this renders the website and the online business invisible or as I like to say in “online nuclear winter.” The basic fact is that Flash cannot be read by any of the major search engines. So if your descriptive text, navigation, headers and footers are created within a Flash website, Google will never read it.

To be SEO Friendly means everything if you seek success online. So, in essence your SEO actually begins with design. This is one of the major mistakes businesses make; they first seek a designer, who may or may not be SEO knowledgeable, much less expert. SEO Friendly ...
... Design is essential and forms the foundation for the long term competitiveness of the website.

Having said all of this, we know that interactive websites achieve better results due to the visual and aural stimulation of video, podcasts, onsite tours, etc. So how can you make this work knowing that search engines love text and text is essential to be found? The answer ultimately is to do both, but in a balanced way so to provide the search engine spiders what they need while providing human beings the right elements and structure to achieve a positive response or conversion.

First the fundamentals of SEO must be adhered to:

1. Search-Engine Friendly Pages †HTML; no Full Flash.
2. Unique Page Titles for every page †must be targeted on the most important keywords (requires keyword research).
3. Unique Meta Descriptions
4. Installation of Search Engine Friendly CMS (Content Management System) to form the basis for consistently adding and indexing new content. We like WordPress and Joomla depending on the needs of the website. Sometimes we use a combination within one domain to take advantage of unique advantages each has.
5. E-Commerce †critical selection of SEO Friendly E-Commerce software; this means SEO-friendly shopping cart structure that includes database functionality for unique product names, unique descriptions; all of which easily read by the search engines by conforming to search engine guidelines. We have great success with Volusion and have used it to “save” certain E-Commerce websites from themselves due to obviously SEO unfriendly E-Commerce software.
6. Blog †Content Management System Selection for easy indexation by the search engines; any such system must be text-readable, include ample room for Titles, Descriptions, Tags, Social Media compatibility, RSS functionality, commenting-friendly.
7. Dynamic Site Map †automatically submits new sitemap to Google every time new content is added to the site.

Remember, there is much more to SEO. These elements alone will not get you to the first page. However, making sure your foundation is strong keeps you in the game and on course towards online success.

With solid SEO fundamentals in place, you now need to pay attention to webpage interaction through optimal user interactivity. After all, getting great ranks isn’t enough … you need visitors to convert. There are countless methods and tools available to increase and optimize user engagement, interaction, and entertainment and ultimately reach both a logical and emotional conclusion towards taking the act of conversion.

Some of the SEO friendly tools that can be integrated into producing websites are:

1. Video Introduction †to grab and hold attention in those first few critical seconds.
2. Sliders †Moving slides of images and / or text that quickly deliver the value proposition to the visitor.
3. Engaging questionnaires or polls
4. Featured Articles and Press Releases
5. Latest Podcasts
6. Animations
7. 2-minute tour of your products and services
8. Special Offers
9. Knowledgebase
10. Newsletter Sign-up

Finally, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do cool effects without Flash. Anthony Calzadilla of Optimum7 recently posted an article which can also be seen on our blog here called “Pure css3 animated at-at walker from stars” which he describes in great detail how he used HTML5 to produce effects normally reserved for Flash … and it’s SEO Friendly!!! The article received a lot of attention last week as it was seen by tens of thousands.

Marrying interactive web design with SEO is ultimately essential towards both driving traffic and driving conversions. You can’t do one without the other and expect to be successful.

Looking for better conversions? Better Traffic? Contact us and let’s talk about it. It’s a free initial consultation.