Building Search Engine Friendly Websites

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Building Search Engine Friendly Websites

By Donald Nelson (copyright 2004)

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.

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He is
the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com)
a firm providing search engine optimization, copywriting and
other web promotion services. You can subscribe to his monthly
newsletter by sending an email message to
subscribe@... with "subscribe" in the subject
line.