by Matt McGee
One World Telecommunications
posted: January 21, 2004
updated: March 15, 2004
If you've read some of the other articles on owtweb.com,
chances are you've read about the need for making a web site "search
engine-friendly" -- in other words, making your site easily
found and indexed by search engines so they appear as high as
possible in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The process of making a site search engine friendly is exactly
that: a process. It's something that must be planned in advance,
and something that really never ends, even if / after your site
ranks at the top of the SERPs (lucky you!). It's not something
you do once and forget about: making a site search engine friendly
should begin during the earliest stages of site planning, continue
through design and development of the site, and get into high
gear after the site launches.
Before we go further, we should clarify that when we say "search
engine friendly," we mean the crawler-based
search engines that actively spider the web (such
as Google, Inktomi, AltaVista, All the Web, etc.).
This doesn't include web directories such as Open
Directory, Yahoo's directory, Skaffe.com, GoGuides.org,
etc. (See our article, Search
Engines vs. Web Directories to learn more.)
Search Engine Friendly Site Planning
You really have to start from day one if you want to make your
web site as search engine friendly as possible. The decisions
you make early on about the type of content you want to present
on
your web site, and how you want to present it, should be made
with an eye toward what will help your site be found, indexed,
and ranked
highly by search engines.
For example, you may decide that your home page should be a
full-page Flash animation. That's about the worst decision
you could make
as far as making your home page search engine friendly. Search
engines want to know what every page they find is about, and
they do that by reading and analyzing the content of the page
-- the
text, the tags, the links (outgoing and incoming), etc. --
search engines are, by and large, unable to read and analyze
the content
inside a Flash animation. So you've given the search engines
nothing. They'll find your home page, but they won't know what
it's about,
and it won't rank highly.
That's just one example. Almost every decision you make about
site layout and design will have some impact on the search
engine friendliness
of your site, including what you might consider minor or unimportant
decisions such as:
- where will the company logo appear on the site?
- how many other graphics will be used in the layout / design?
- will our site menu be done with graphics or in text?
- will our site menu have special effects such as DHTML "dropdowns" or
javascript "rollovers"?
- etc.
If you plan to work with a professional SEO company (such as
OWT!), you should work together from the start to discuss the
best ways to build a
search engine friendly foundation for your site.
Search Engine Friendly Site Design / Layout
This is also covered to some degree in our article,
Professional Web Site Design
101, and we'll borrow some of
those ideas and expand
into others in this article.
As we said earlier, search engines rely on text to determine
what a web page is about. They can't "read" pictures. They can't see the text on your
site graphics. So, since text is what the search engines want, give them text!
That's not to say you have to (or should) build an all-text web site. The point
is this: make sure your site site design isn't too graphic-intensive, and especially
doesn't use graphics to present content that would be better presented as text.
Search engines also like fresh content, so when working on
the design and layout of your site, be sure you have a place
to post
fresh content
on
a regular basis.
It can be an entire section of your site devoted to newsletters,
or just a small section of your home page designed for announcements
of
sales,
special offers,
etc. The more fresh content, the better -- but more on that
in a moment. The
point for now is to plan on creating fresh content when you
work on the design and layout of your site.
Search engines also like to follow links, so give them lots
of opportunities to do that in your site design and layout.
Firstly,
you must have
a text-based menu somewhere on your site. Search engine crawlers
may
or may not be
able to follow links in your javascript or DHTML (depends how
the links/menu are programmed).
If they can't follow those links, and you don't give them a
text-only menu
to use as an alternate, they won't find the rest of your web
site, and rather than
having 10, 20, or 100 pages listed in Google, you'll only have
one page listed. When working on site design and layout, make
sure you
have a
text-based menu
for the search engines to follow! Secondly, when writing the
content text for your site, take every opportunity you can
to link to related
content
elsewhere
on your site.
Search Engine Friendly Site Maintenance
After your site is launched, the process of making your web
site search engine friendly continues in a couple different
directions.
We'll call
this "maintenance",
because your web site (much like a car) needs regular tuning and good care to
keep it "running" well.
We already mentioned the first aspect of search engine friendly
site maintenance: fresh, quality content. A great idea for
content is
articles about your
business, your products, or your services. Consider, for
example, the Articles section
of this web site that you're reading now: New content posted
regularly with lots of material for the search engines to
index. This is
both "customer-friendly" and "search
engine-friendly" content!
It's important to add that your content should also be added
on a regular, consistent basis. One new article a month is
better than
nothing, but
a weekly or even daily
addition of fresh content is a lot better. Google crawls
the web
constantly, and updates its listings as it finds fresh content.
The more new content
it finds on a web site, the sooner the crawler will come
back next time. And if
it finds
more fresh content again, it'll come back even more quickly
the next time. This means that your site gets new pages added
to
the search
engine more
quickly, and your site will also get rewarded with higher
rankings in the SERPs because
your content is fresher, meaning it's more relevant to a
search than a site that
hasn't been updated in a month.
Let me say that in simpler terms: the more quality content
you add to your site, and the more often you add it, the
higher your
site
will rank
in
Google (and
most other search engines, too).
The other aspect of search engine friendly site maintenance
is acquiring quality links from other web sites to yours
-- these
are called incoming
links. The
more incoming links your site has, the more traffic you'll
get, and the higher your
site will rank in search engines. Google pioneered the idea
of "link popularity",
and most every search engine has followed their lead to some degree. Incoming
links are like endorsements or recommendations that your site is good, and search
engines want good sites to be at the top of their search results. The word "quality" appears
in bold at the beginning of this paragraph because you don't want just any incoming
link. You have to avoid link farms, guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, etc.
Search engines consider these links useless, and will even penalize your site
if "bad neighborhoods" like these link to your site.
These are the basics of making a search engine friendly web
site. They're no guarantee of a No. 1 ranking, but following
the advice
here will
help you get
closer to that goal.
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