Creating SEO-friendly graphic web design content
What is Graphic Web Design?
What does the term mean? Graphic Web Design typically refers to reworking some or all of the content of your website to focus more on graphical aspects instead of textual context. This is normally done to provide “prettier fonts” and “smoother edges” on some of the text. Possibly special effects (such as drop-shadows) are possible on graphical text (a .jpg image of text, for instance), whereas on raw text, most fonts are traditionally rendered blocky and ugly, even by modern browsers (even worse, the traditional list of “web-friendly” fonts is markably short!). The graphic web design website should never have ugly text, of course!
A Website heavily focused on graphics can often have a difficult time with search engine indexing due to a lack of textual content. This can often mean poor search engine traffic results.
Typically, a graphic web design will focus on maximizing the visual impact of the website. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of minimizing the impact on the search engine, which focuses primarily on structure, content and tags.
Most graphic web design websites also primarily use flash content, so even the “human-readable” text portions of their websites are lost to the search engines. Flash-only websites should typically be avoided until a better solution is found!
Why won’t my graphic web design site show in the search engines?
It’s probably there somewhere. On page 10… or 20… maybe 30… It depends on the terms you are trying to target. An abstractionist painter, for instance, would target the terms “abstract art”. In this case, the particular keyword term is likely to be fairly saturated on the search engines, and likely by historical and information pages about “abstract art” and/or “artists”… This is very problematic for the graphic web design website that just wants their work to be seen!
How can I get my graphic web design website to rank well?
Graphic Web design websites (the “Photo-gallery” websites) are still traditionally difficult to rank well. In this case, it is vitally important that every consideration be taken to all parts of the website structure. In particular, file names, image names, and particular title/alt tags for the HTML source of the image will traditionally help.
It is also extremely important that text be intermingled with images. This will provide search engines much greater accessibility to the content of the pages and over time will eventually help the site’s ranking dramatically. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our pretty fonts to give the search engines something to read too!!
Consider a free website consultation if you have a particular marketing need. I look forward to hearing from you!