How To Ensure The Search Engines Find Your Website
One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine
optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your
website are as accessible as possible to the search engines.
It's not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but
also the internal pages within a site's structure. The internal
pages of a site often contain important content such as
products, services or general information, and therefore can be
uniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy access
to these pages is vital.
There are many do's and don'ts involved in ensuring all of your
pages can be found by search engines. However, it is important
to first establish how the search engines find and index web
pages.
Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders")
to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. A robot
is a computer programme that can follow the hyperlinks on a web
page, which is known as "crawling". When a robot finds a
document it includes the contents within the search engine's
index, then follows the next links it can find and continues the
process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes
apparent that the navigational structure of a website is
important in getting as many pages as possible indexed.
When considering the navigational structure of your site, the
hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judge
what they feel to be the most important pages of a site when
considering rankings and a page's position in the site structure
can influence this. The homepage is generally considered the
most important page of a site - it is the top level document and
usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search
engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three
clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages
should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and
so forth.
The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together.
Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links,
meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit
buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query
strings that have two or more parameters are also typically
ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated
website.
The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTML
text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but the
text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe the
destination page - an optimisation plus point. Image links are
also acceptable but the ability to describe the destination page
is diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much ranking
weight as anchor text.
The most natural way to organise content on a website is to
categorise it. Break down your products, services or information
into related categories and then structure this so that the most
important aspects are linked to from the homepage. If you have a
vast amount of information for each category then again you will
want to narrow your content down further. This could involve
having articles on a similar topic, different types of product
for sale, or content that can be broken down geographically.
Categorisation is natural optimisation - the further you break
down your information the more content you can provide and the
more niche key phrases there are that can be targeted.
If you are still concerned that your important pages may not get
indexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your website.
A sitemap can be best described as an index page - it is a list
of links to all of the pages within a site contained on one
page. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it gives
a robot easy access to all of the pages within your site. Just
remember - robots typically can't follow more than 100 links
from one page, so if your site is larger than this you may want
to consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.
There are many considerations to make when optimising your site
for search engines, and making your pages accessible to search
engine robots should be the first step of your optimisation
process. Following the advice above will help you make your
entire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple rankings
and extra traffic.