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A
good looking and user friendly website
is an extremely important asset to your
success on the Internet. However without
traffic, even a well designed site will
not produce results for you. The best
websites are those that are both attractive
and easy to use by your human users, and
at the same time, convenient for the search
engine robots that are trying to find
and collect data from your site.
Oftentimes
a site that may look good to your eye
has some design flaws that impair its
search engine friendliness. Here are a
few things to look for when designing
new sites or optimizing an existing site.
1.
Where does your first line of text begin?
You may think, that's easy, the first
line of text is right at the top?? If
you view your web page using Notepad or
the html view of popular editors you may
be surprised to find that the first line
of your actual searchable text may be
pushed down, 100 lines or more, by long
strings of java script and by the html
code that defines your tables.
The
higher your text appears in this html
view of the site, the easier it is for
the robot to find it and put it in the
search engine data base. You can save
space in your html code by copying your
java script and placing it in an external
file uploaded to your server. Instead
of having 50 lines of java script commands
in your html code, there will only be
one line pointing to the separate file
with the java script.
Similarly
if you simplify your table structure,
your searchable text will become more
prominent. The left-hand navigation bar,
for example, with its separate graphic
elements each in its own row, may be a
place where you can economize on your
code by merging the rows into one cell.
2.
Is your website graphics-predominant,
at the expense of searchable text?
If your site begins with a splash page,
such as a lovely page-filling picture
of the ocean and no text except, "enter
here", then you are wasting a big
opportunity. Search engines consider your
main page, the one you reach when you
land at www.yourcompany.com, to be the
most important page. Your main text with
its important keywords should be on your
first page. If you already have splash
page, you should consider scrapping it
altogether, or at least adding a paragraph
with a powerful capsule description of
your activity.
If
your site has a flash-only first page
then the text message on that page is
not visible, except for what you are able
to put in your title and description tags.
Search engine robots cannot read the text
message that has been put in the form
of a flash movie. If you want to use flash,
and also do well in search engine rankings
it is better to make a hybrid page where
the flash is surrounded by a normal html
page with text. The text around the flash
movie should be optimized so that the
page ranks well in search engine queries
for your important keywords.
3.
Have you unknowingly rendered important
text as a graphic?
If your site is about wireless widgets
made in California then you would want
some prominent text near the top of the
page with these words. You may already
have it but the text has been changed
into a beautiful gif or jpg graphic either
by your designer or by your html editing
program. Search engines will not give
that nice-looking graphic the same importance
as it would text written as an H1 or H2
header. Some popular html editors render
entire paragraphs as gif graphic images.
All the text that appears in the image
becomes almost invisible to the search
engines. I say almost invisible because
you can always put an alt text for any
graphic, however this alt text is not
weighed as heavily as normal text set
as bold or in headers. So, check your
pages and make sure that your text is
normal text and not an image.
4.
Can Search Engines Follow Your Site's
Link structure?
If your site employs a drop-down menu
that is run with java script, then search
engines may find your main page, but they
won't follow the links to your interior
pages. Similarly if your navigation area
is an image map, a graphic with "hot
spots" that link to your various
internal pages then the search engines
cannot and will not find the other pages
of your site. To get maximum traffic it
is imperative to have as many of your
pages as possible indexed in the big search
engines. You can accomplish this by adding
a text-based navigation area at the bottom
of your pages or a site-map page with
text links to all your interior pages.
If
you pay attention to these design considerations,
you can greatly improve your site's chances
of appearing near the top of search results.
::
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- Donald Nelson
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