I recently logged onto a forum I read quite alot and noticed a post from somebody promoting a new web site they had done. Being the curious type I thought I would take a look. Design wise the site looked quite nice, but the way it had been built made me very uncomfortable.
1. The site had a splash page as the opening page. No text on it, just a large logo type image in the centre of the screen. On closer inspection this image had no ALT tag, there was not description or keyword tags in the META data. The guy had used an external CSS file though so give him credit for that.
2. On clicking through to the site the page loaded slowly. Could be a hosting issue, or it could be that ALL his graphics were PNGs, where he could have easily used GIFs or JPEGs. There was nothing overcomplicated about this page that would have required transparent PNGs. Again, the layout of the page was nice and pleasing to the eye
3. HORROR! To my amazement every peice of text on this page is embedded in a PNG. Basically there is NO text on the page at all, and even worse the images containing the text don’t have an ALT property.
4. Again, these main pages dont have description or keyword tags and the Title property just contains the name of the web page i.e About Us, Constitution etc.
It may well be that the designer of the site isn’t too bothered about SEO, but why get into the habit of using bad techniques to build your site. Start as you mean to go on. There is no reason why design should suffer when it comes to building a search engine friendly web site. The two can co-exist with a little bit of time and effort.
If you are looking for an SEO review of your existing web site then contact eSoftware Solutions, a UK SEO Company, who will be more than happy to help you out. We are a friendly, trust worthy SEO with references available on request.
