When designing Web pages for the Internet, it is important to design those pages for both people and search engines in mind. If you or your Web designer design a beautiful flash site with a lot of bells and whistles; but forget to optimize the site's pages for the search engine algorithms, then you might end up with the most beautiful Website that no one knows about. Conversely, if you keep the design ultra simple, with few images and the pages load fast, you'll have a page that is more search friendly; but one that will not be very appealing to the visitors to your site.
Clearly there is a need to find a harmonious balance between a great looking Website and one that search engine spiders/robots can easily crawl and index. For starters if you are going to be using JavaScript on your Website, then it is recommended that you link to an external JavaScript file. Some of the search engine spiders still have difficulty in crawling pages successfully that contain a lot of JavaScript. Also, flash pages can be a problem area when it comes to having your Web pages crawled successfully. It's important that you use HTML links for your navigation also, as the search 'bots can't follow JavaScript links.
Another way of designing a Website that is both people friendly and machine friendly is to include a Site Map with your site. Site Maps make it easy for site visitors to find the information they are looking for and it facilitiates the crawling of all of your Web pages by the search engine spiders. Internal pages with links back to your home/index page count just as much as external links do, so it is important that you do everything you can to ensure that *all* of your Web pages get crawled and indexed by the search engines.
As part of creating a search friendly Website, you will want to take a look at the Google Guidelines. Most companies and individuals with a Web presence want to rank well on Google for obvious reasons. Google is by far the most popular search engine and has approximately 66% of the search engine market. In the Google Webmaster Guidelines you will find a section where it outlines several things that as a Webmaster you should NOT do. For instance you should not use hidden text or hidden links as these are attempts by 'black hat' Search Engine Optimizers to spam their way to higher rankings. Also, cloaking is mentioned as another unethical practice that is stricly taboo. Cloaking is the practice of serving different versions of your home page to different search 'bots, with each version specifically optimized to rank well according to that particular search engines ranking algorithm.
Some other unethical practices mentioned are not to use doorway or gateway pages in an attempt to spam the search engines. Also, it is important not to have any orphan pages to your site. All of your pages need to be linked up with at least one other page from your Website. Regarding the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it is important that you follow them to the letter if you want to ever get high organic rankings in the Google SERPS.
Best Search Engine Optimization - SEO methodologies are those practices that follow the search engine guidelines and that produce high organic rankings. Some of the main components of using best SEO practices would include:
Clearly there is a need to find a harmonious balance between a great looking Website and one that search engine spiders/robots can easily crawl and index. For starters if you are going to be using JavaScript on your Website, then it is recommended that you link to an external JavaScript file. Some of the search engine spiders still have difficulty in crawling pages successfully that contain a lot of JavaScript. Also, flash pages can be a problem area when it comes to having your Web pages crawled successfully. It's important that you use HTML links for your navigation also, as the search 'bots can't follow JavaScript links.
Another way of designing a Website that is both people friendly and machine friendly is to include a Site Map with your site. Site Maps make it easy for site visitors to find the information they are looking for and it facilitiates the crawling of all of your Web pages by the search engine spiders. Internal pages with links back to your home/index page count just as much as external links do, so it is important that you do everything you can to ensure that *all* of your Web pages get crawled and indexed by the search engines.
As part of creating a search friendly Website, you will want to take a look at the Google Guidelines. Most companies and individuals with a Web presence want to rank well on Google for obvious reasons. Google is by far the most popular search engine and has approximately 66% of the search engine market. In the Google Webmaster Guidelines you will find a section where it outlines several things that as a Webmaster you should NOT do. For instance you should not use hidden text or hidden links as these are attempts by 'black hat' Search Engine Optimizers to spam their way to higher rankings. Also, cloaking is mentioned as another unethical practice that is stricly taboo. Cloaking is the practice of serving different versions of your home page to different search 'bots, with each version specifically optimized to rank well according to that particular search engines ranking algorithm.
Some other unethical practices mentioned are not to use doorway or gateway pages in an attempt to spam the search engines. Also, it is important not to have any orphan pages to your site. All of your pages need to be linked up with at least one other page from your Website. Regarding the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it is important that you follow them to the letter if you want to ever get high organic rankings in the Google SERPS.
Best Search Engine Optimization - SEO methodologies are those practices that follow the search engine guidelines and that produce high organic rankings. Some of the main components of using best SEO practices would include:
- Using a Title tag with your main keywords in it.
- Using Meta description and Meta keywords tags, again with your main keywords included in both tags.
- Using opening and closing paragraph tags
- Using your main keywords in Header tags
- Using your main keywords in image Alt tags
- Optimizing your images to ensure that they load fast
- Using your main keywords in some of your hyperlinks
- Using regular a href links and not JavaScript links so that your links can be followed by the search spiders.
- Validating all of your pages to ensure that they don't contain any coding or spelling errors.
- Using a browser checker to make sure that your pages all render the same on the various browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc.
- Making sure that all of your pages have their own unique Title and Meta tags
- Making sure that all of your pages load as quickly as possible.
- To improve your page's load time, link to external CSS and JavaScript files.
No comments:
Post a Comment