While there are many steps to properly optimize your site for the search engines, the first step is learning how to design a search engine friendly website. By designing a search engine friendly website, you are making it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders to read and index your web pages. If this step is overlooked your efforts will not be maximized, possibly meaning that the search engines can’t access and/or process your website. In addition to this preventative measure, designing a search engine friendly website can also help improve your rankings in search engines. There are, in general, six different steps you can take to creating a search engine friendly website. Let’s try to understand each of those steps more in-depth throughout this tutorial.

Please note that some of the material covered in this section is rather technical, however, we will try our best to keep this tutorial as non-technical as possible.

Using Well Formed, W3C Validated HTML Code
The first step towards creating your search engine friendly website is to make sure that your HTML code is correct and well-formed.  To do this, make sure that you have closed all tags which need to be closed and that you haven’t used a source code which could confuse the search engine spider. Examples of this would be old and outdated codes or codes that are so new they have not yet been recognized by most search engine spiders.

Use of Flash Technology, JavaScript & Frames
Flash, JavaScript and/or Frames pages are possible to optimize, however, it is significantly more difficult to do so.  Therefore, if you want to design a search engine friendly website it is simply best to avoid using these technologies if possible.  In the event that you feel you have to use them, or you are optimizing a site which is already built around these technologies, then it is important to know what to do.  We will address the workarounds for these technologies in a future tutorial.

Proper use of URLs
As mentioned in the first step, it is important not to utilize codes that will confuse the search engine spiders. With that said, when designing a search engine friendly site, you also want to make sure that you use URLs that the search engine spiders can easily follow. The spiders find and process web pages by following links from one site to another. This means that if your website’s URLs make it difficult for the search engine spider to download and/or process the pages found on your website it is possible that your web pages may never get crawled.  A page that is not crawled is also a page that has zero chance of appearing in the search engine results.  Simply put, if you don’t use a search engine friendly URL all of your optimization efforts may be worthless given that the search engines won’t even know the pages exist.  Despite this, it is also important to note that the right URL may actually help your rankings in the search engine.  Developing SEO friendly URLs will be discussed in a future tutorial.

Website and Directory Structure
In this step, it is important to know that the search engines may have a more difficult time indexing your website the deeper a page may be on it (e.g. the more links that a visitor has to click to get to a particular page, the harder it is for search engines to find). Therefore, unless your site happens to be exceptionally popular with a lot of incoming links, you can assume that the search engines are not going to crawl that deep into your site. Due to this problem, many sites employ a sitemap which lists all of the pages on one’s website. When done properly, this allows you to coherently organize the material on your website while simultaneously ensuring that the search engines are able to reach (and thus crawl or process) all of the pages on your site.

Limiting the size of your web pages
There is a general rule of how large a page each of the major search engines will index.  This amount varies from search engine to search engine, and even from site to site (more popular sites have a larger limit than less popular sites).  Therefore, in general, it is best to limit the size of your pages to 100k or less (this does not include picture size, which does not effect how much text gets indexed).  This limit (i.e., 100k) is based upon the fact that this may still be Google’s limit.  Even if there have been some indications that Google may have raised that limit, it is best to be safe rather than sorry.  In addition, it is easier to optimize pages with less content and when you split up your larger pages into more detailed pages you provide the search engines with more opportunities to find and fully index your web pages for relevant keywords.

Proper use of Robots.txt file
A Robots.txt file is used to tell search engine spiders which pages not to index. Upfront this may not seem like something you may want to use, but the advantage of using a Robots.txt is that it focuses the search engines on indexing your “important” customer-development, product, and/or sales pages. Remember that the search engine spiders function with limited time and resources when indexing sites, so therefore it would be best to use that time wisely. For example, there is no need for the search engines to index your privacy policy page.  Additional pages that should not be indexed by the search engines include image directories or otherwise sensitive company data, such as company passwords.

There are your six important steps to help you create a search engine friendly website.  While some of this content may be too technical, just concentrate on comprehending the basics and make sure that your programmer understands what it is that he or she is suppose to do.  It is not crucial that you know all of the details mentioned in this blog, however, it is extremely important that your programmer/developer (or whoever it is that is building your site) does understand the information described above, as it can help fully optimize your site if done properly, or hurt it if done wrong.

Stay tuned for more detailed explanations of how to address the issues mentioned above to be posted in the near future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Rise Interactive, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SEM Tutorial, SEO Friendly Web Design, Site Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.