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| Search Engine Friendly Web Design |
By
Danny Hoffman |
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Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Any design can be search engine friendly. Search engine friendly design simply means taking the needs of the search engines into account when planning the site. Although any design you want can be search engine friendly, making a specific “look” search engine friendly may require slightly different solutions than those you are used to. We will describe the needs of search engines and present several solutions - so that you can take these needs into account when you start designing.
Spiders
Each search engine (SE) finds web sites and web pages using its own ”spider”. The spider is a program designed to find and scan web pages on the net. The spider “crawls” the content of each page it finds and enters this data into a database, called an “index”. Some spiders do not crawl deep into sites; some will only crawl the home page and pages with links from the home page. Some spiders will only crawl pages that are no more than one level down in the site hierarchy. It is therefore vital that:
The home page have links to the main pages of your site
Your most important pages not be buried deep in the site hierarchy.
Following these two rules is the only way to be sure that search engine spiders will crawl and index the important parts of your site.
What do spiders index?
Search engine spiders are looking for text. They generally ignore graphics and Flash and read text. Spiders relate to pages much like an old text only browser. For them, text = content. In other words, the assumption is that “if it’s written in text, it must really be important to the content of the page”.
The text that is most important to them is the text that is displayed when a browser loads your web page and you select “View>source” in the browser’s menu. The “source” is the code of the page that is displayed to the surfer.
SE’s evaluate the text of the page that a surfer will see, not what is displayed in the browser. In other words, they do not index the non-text elements, what has been programmed somewhere else on the site, or content that exists on only a remote server.
Things to remember when designing a site:
1. Text: Search Engines don’t index graphics or flash and give preference to pages that have keyword text near the top of the page (especially the first 100 words or so); therefore, JavaScript, images, unnecessary meta tags, and navigation instructions that run at the top of the page before the body reduce the effectiveness of the keywords. Try to design your pages so that the body text (i.e., keyword text) comes as close to the top of the page of code as possible. See #9 below for techniques to help with this.
A heading tag containing keyword phrases can be very effective in obtaining good rankings if placed at the top of the page.
2. Scripts: Leave JavaScripts off page: For instance, say your pages all contain a JavaScript containing instructions about how the navigation is displayed. The script can be written in a separate file called “nav.js” and stored elsewhere on the site, and not written into the code of each page.
3. Keywords: Before you begin find popular keyword phrases and power keyword phrases related to your site. These phrases will be the basis for your domain name, page names, page titles, and page content.
4. Title: Always have a title tag on a page, immediately after the head tag and optimize the title text for each page.
The site setup should allow titles to be individually written for each page, and not simply machine generated.
5. The Head section of each page
a. The Title tag: To repeat, it must be able to be changed on each individual page. The Title tag is the single most important on page element in web positioning, therefore it is vital that each page can have its own unique title that reflects the keywords and page content.
It is also very important that the title tag come at the very top of the page. Design the pages so that all other head content and HTTP-EQUIV tags come after the title tag. The Title tag should be placed immediately after the head tag. Schematically the page should be like this:
Html
Head
Title
Meta Tags, if used, use in this order: description>keywords>others
/Head
Body
/Body
/Html
b. The description tag is less important but it also needs to be included in such a way that an individual tag can be written for each page. The description tag influence the text that appears with your page title in the search engine results page. The keyword tag is even less important, but should be included after the title and description tags. It should also be possible to individually update these tags for each page.
c. Most other meta tags are usually not necessary, and most don't actually do anything. The "update" tag is a good example of this.
6. Home Page: Don’t use frames. Don’t make an all Flash or all graphic home page. Use text including your main keywords on the home page.
7. Frames: Try not to use them, but optimize them if you do (using the tag).
8. Flash: Avoid when possible. Try to avoid pages that are completely Flash. Do not make the home page all Flash or graphics. If you do use Flash, leave room for some actual text (at least a few sentences). If necessary, use layers so that there is info for the SE’s to read and index.
9. Generated or ASP Pages: Avoid stop characters that can choke SE spiders. Server generated or ASP sites are popular today with designers because of the ease with which they can be maintained. SE spiders can read ASP pages (they rank the final content that the browser displays to the surfer), but they are nonetheless problematic if we want our site to be read and indexed by SE spiders.
Why? Many search engine spiders reject dynamically generated pages. If the URL contains a “?” = “%”; or similar characters, it may not be crawled or indexed. Important: “&id=” or “SID=” are the most difficult characters for SE’s to follow, so avoid them if at all possible. The Google spider will not follow URL s that contain “&id=”. SE robots are also worried about getting caught in what they call “robot traps”; a sort of loop with no end to the number of links a program generates. In any case, if the spider does crawl such a page it may not crawl the “generated” elements. Program your site to use URL’s that don’t need these stop characters, or limit them to 2 or less per URL.
10. Keyword text: Use keywords in text form (not graphics) on the relevant pages for each keyword. Make sure your text is more prominent than your navigation tables.
11. Links: Link to your main pages from the home page and back from the main pages to your home page. Have a link to your home page from every page on the site.
12. Site map: Use a site map with a “static style” URL, so that SE spiders will follow the site map links to the other pages on the site. Link to the site map from your home page. Use keyword rich hyperlink URL’s, text links, and descriptive text with keywords to further tie your site together and ensure the SE’s find all your pages.
13. Don’t spam: Don’t keyword stuff your pages and tags, don’t spam the submissions pages of the search engines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danny Hoffman has run an SEM and Web positioning business since 1998. He is a Google Adwords Professional, with experience working for both large and small clients. Web site: http://webpositioning.co.il
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