Hi ya, there is a common misconception that SEO makes ugly text based websites, and I thought I would share some of the elements that should and can be included into web designs to make them more SEO friendly and usable too. There is a strong relationship between usable websites, and SEO friendly websites, namely because Google and the other search engines all love usable websites. Ok so lets start, I will give examples of the elements that you can use to help improve your site.
Breadcrumbs for SEO
I’ve taken this little screeny from the Wuup website as an example, but you can see already why this is a a good usability element, and a great SEO tool. So lets examine why. Firstly the point of breadcrumbs is to show the user where they are, and the journey that they could have taken to get there if they took a standard method of browsing via category and then to the article itself. If they went straight to the article, they can see that can go back a level to see if there are more similar articles that may interest them. ‘HOME’ also shows that they can get back to the beginning and that it is the top level of page. From an SEO point of view, the ‘HOME’ & ‘JAVASCRIPT’ are both links, if you mouse over them they will have a rollover underline showing the user they can click through. Internal linking is one of the more weightier factors of SEO, and having the links with their names is relevant ‘anchor text’, boosting the pages they link to and their ranking performance.
Related Pages or Articles for SEO
Again I took this element from Wuup, so you’ll be familiar with it, but it also shows that I’m doing these things for a reason. The related articles are great for a few reasons. Firstly lets start with the dates, the recent dates tell the crawlers who come to the site that the site is updated frequently, as they are all pretty recent dates, it then links to more pages which tells the crawlers / search engines that these pages are important, boosting its importance due to internal linking. Then you notice I have left in where you have the yellow sort of tag, ‘Wireframing & Modules for Design’, this is a ‘title’ tag, which you can add to links i.e:
<a href="link.htmk" title="title of link page">Text to link</a>
Titles are great for accessibility as these are often read by various screen reading software, and helps contribute your designs to a AA or AAA accessibility standard – just to note, they are also not intrusive, as they only appear if you hover your mouse over, and sometimes not at all for firefox users where it is a bit glitchy.
Static Links for SEO
As with many blogs, the content is constantly changing, this isn’t always a good think if their are very particular terms you want to rank for, and rank for the long term, and one way on a blog to do that is static links which give every single entry on your blog, an internal link to a select few pages, the important ones. So here is my example:
Ok these links above, appear on every single page of this website, giving them a higher importance in internal linking than any other page – and to to prove that this can work, please check out these links: (look out for wuup)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=increase+google+crawl+rate&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=google+g1+android+review&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Windows+Vista+Ultimate+64-Bit+review&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=as3+basics&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=as3+tutorials&btnG=Search&meta=
These are all page 1 rankings, some better than others. Bioshock one is a phail, but lets see in a few months how that one is doing 
