Making a site Search Engine Friendly
Search Engine Accessability
The first step to making a site Search Engine Friendly, is making sure that the search engine spider or robot can actualy get to the site and navigate about it. This usualy means having some form of static HTML text links. There are two main methods of doing this.
- Put a footer, or navigation link to a static HTML sitemap
- Put links to all the important pages in the footer of your page.
How do Search Engines See my site?
An important thing to understand is how a search engine sees your site and what it will and wont read. Typically search engines will only follow href and src URL attributes. Fancy javascript and redirect links will probably be ignored by the search engines which is why its a good idea to have both static footer links and a static HTML site map. Use this Search Engine Spider Simulation Tool to see how search engines view your web site.
Friendly Code
Another important (and debateable) step is to validate your code with the W3C validator. If the search engines can't read all of your code then you stand no chance of getting ranked. An important note is that (at the time of writting) it is not required by search engines for your site to have validated code but it certainly can't hurt. Many WYSIWYG editors create very messy code which is why I produce only hand coded XHTML 1.0 which is inherinantly search engine friendly due to the way the mark up is written.
Get rid of the rubbish
If you have lots of javascript code or style code in the head or top of your docuement the search engines will hjave to trawl through all of this to find your content before it can even think about ranking it. Remove this code and out it in external js or css files. This not only improves the overall performance of your site and reduce your bandwidth quite dramaticaly but makes your site much more search engine friendly. This brings us to the point of utilising CSS code. Many table based sites have very bulky code with every table data cell being formatted in the same manner. By using an overall style (in the tradition of cascading style sheets) you heavily reduce code bulk which increases the proximitey and density of your text Vs code.
Keeping Clean
After you have had a tidy up makes sure that you add descriptive alt tags to any image links. Remove any unneccessary code and tidy it up as much as possible. Keep your code clean and simple and try not to use too many fancy javascript features, no matter how attractive they are!
Trevor Stolber is an Online Marketing professional specialising in
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Trevor Stolber owns and runs WEB-Wizard LLP
who specialise in fast and efficient business web sites.
This article may be freely reprinted as long as this resource box is kept in place with all links.
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