HOW TO DESIGN A SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY WEBSITE
Search engines favour well designed web sites with plenty text
content for their top rankings. Here's some tips on how to
design a web site to be ranked at the top in the search engines.
Text Content The cornerstone to your web site is the text
content. Make sure the site contains plenty subject matter right
from the start. Your home page will introduce and describe the
content of the site while each section goes into more detail on
the relevant subject.
When adding text content to your site, identify the key search
terms and use them in context. Where possible highlight the
search terms by placing them in bold text or within tags.
This makes the key search terms stand out so that search engines
mark them as being important.
Frames Although all search engines claim to be able to navigate
frames, they still complicate matters. The best advice is to
avoid frames entirely. Framed sites are listed in search
engines, but no matter how many tricks are employed, they never
seem to get listed as high as their non-frames equivalent.
If you have a frames based site, consider rebuilding it without
frames. You'll see your listings skyrocket.
Page Forwarding Many sites are now using page forwarding. It is
used on the home page of a site to determine if a visitor has
Flash installed, or what browser they are using. After testing
the visitors machine, they are then forwarded to the appropriate
real home page.
This practise does not help with search engine listings. Your
home page should be designed to work with any browser, and
visitors should be given the choice of proceeding into a Flash
site or a standard HTML site. In any case, forwarding past your
home page is missing the chance to introduce plenty of good text
content to visitor or search engine.
Heavy Graphics Don't use too many graphics on each page, and
certainly don't embed valuable text in your graphics. Search
engine spiders see all graphics the same - indecipherable binary
code - and embedded text will not be read.
Where you do use graphics, make sure to add alt-tags to describe
the image, including key words and search terms where applicable.
Dynamic Pages One of the great things about the internet today
is the immediacy of information. Dynamic web sites make it
possible to keep content bang up to date with minimum effort.
There is a fallacy that if your site contains dynamic pages it
will not be indexed by search engines. This belief is only
partly true. Search engines will visit any page, .asp, .php,
.cfm etc. If the URL for the page ends with the extension such
as /pagename.php it will be indexed and added to the search
engine. If however dynamic information is passed within the URL
e.g. pagename.php?section=2&user=xyz, then the page will not be
indexed.
The idea behind gaining listings for your dynamic pages is to
ensure that your home page and other top level section pages do
not include dynamic information in the URL. Deeper into the
site, sure, include all the dynamic information you want, but at
the top level make sure there is enough apparently static
information to gain some search engine listings.
If you already run a fully dynamic site, take a look at our
optimisation section for some ideas on promotional and traffic
capture pages.
Flash Try and avoid building your main site entirely in Flash.
If you do, you'll also have to build an alternative site in HTML
or you will receive no listings whatsoever. Search engines
cannot read anything within a Flash file.
The use of Flash within a web site is acceptable, provided its
use is monitored. Animation and moving logos are great - they
add interest and depth to a site. Flash buttons and text
embedded within Flash is not so great. Search engines will not
follow the links to other pages and cannot read or index any
text within the Flash file. Use Flash sparingly.
Navigation Search engine spiders start at a site home page and
follow all the links within the site until they reach a dead end
before jumping to the next site on their list. The key to good
navigation is to make sure that search engine spiders can reach
as much of your site as possible before jumping to the next site.
At the very least, every page within your site must have a link
back to the home page. This is crucial. In addition, links to
each of the other main pages within the site help the spider
move around more efficiently.
If your main navigation is a set of buttons at the top of the
page, like in this site, add some small text links at the bottom
of each page just to make it easier for search engines and
visitors to get around your site.