Optimizing
your website's design for search engines
It is a well known fact
that big search engines like Google are paying the most attention
to the links that point back to your website. However, that
does not mean that your website
design does not matter. You
should take a break from looking for link partners and invest
some time in optimizing your website's design; it will pay
of in the long run. Below you will find some tips on how
to optimize your layout in order for search engine spiders
to crawl your website correctly.
Use of images in search
engine ranking process.
The most important thing to understand about search engines'
spiders is that they can only read text. That means that
whatever text you have inside the image will not be read
by any spider. Of course, website without images will be
boring to look at but be careful not to put important text
inside the image. It is relatively easy to surround your
body text with images to make it look as if the text is part
of an image without hurting your search engine ranking chances.
Discuss these things with your web designer.
Create meta tags.
Creating meta tags
is the next step toward successful search engine optimization.
Meta tags
are designed to give search
engine spider in idea about your website before it actually
crawls the body of the page itself. Meta data gives the spider
title of your page, short description and the keywords that
are relevant to that page. Notice that the word "page" is
used here; spiders look at each page of your website separately.
Here are some examples and explanations on meta tags:
TITLE - that's the title of your page. Do not make it too
long and don't try to put too many keywords in it. Never
the less, you should have 1-2 of your major keywords in
the title.
DESCRIPTION - that's the description of you page. It should
be 1-2 sentences and should make sense because search engines
like Google use it when displaying your listing, along with
title tag.
KEYWORDS - that's the keywords that relate to your website.
Make sure you put keywords that have been used in the body
of you page. If you put keywords that are nowhere to be found
on your page some search engines might penalize for it and
filter out your website.
Use style sheets.
Today using style sheets or CSS is a common practice but
you still better make sure your website is using one. Style
sheets help you clean up your code and remove font tags that
might cause problems with spiders. In the past webmasters
filled pages with tons of keywords in the tiny font size
and therefore search engines started to penalize for it.
Using CSS ensures that all text is of the same size as well
as spider is concerned; visually all fonts will look different.
Now webmasters are even building the whole sites on CSS.
Image alt tags.
Image alt tags are an important part of
your website optimization. Image alt tag contains text that
you see when moving your
mouse over the image. It is also the text that is used to
describe an image if your website's visitor has images disabled.
Because search engine spiders can't read text inside the
image, it reads alt tag as a way to understand what the image
is about. It seems that search engines are not penalizing
for stuffing alt tags with keywords but be careful not to
overdue it.
H tags.
H
tags or headings have been known to increase website ranking
for a while now. But is it
really so? We have strong reasons
to believe that h tags (mostly H1 tag) do not get you better
ranking. They are, however, a great way to organize content
of your page so it is not very surprising that some webmaster
still think they can bring better ranking. Also, using keywords
in H tags will increase your keyword density. So by increasing
your keyword density and organizing your content, you can
actually get better ranking but it is not thanks to h tags.
There are a lot of website owners that complain that H tags
are difficult to work with. Our advice to this is: "Don't
use them if you have no place to put them or if you don't
have much content to organize." There are plenty of
high ranking websites that don't use H tags at all.
Your website's navigation.
Make sure it's crawlable. People often build a website but
soon realize that search engine spider does not go any farther
then index page. Even though you have links to most of your
pages from the home page spiders might still have difficulty
indexing your pages. There are several reasons why this happens:
Your website is using JavaScript navigation menu. If you
have drop down menus in your navigation then it is surely
designed in JavaScript. JavaScript is not crawlable by search
engine spiders, therefore spider cannot index your other
pages. There are several ways to fix this problem. Try adding
simple text links to your major pages at the bottom of your
home page so that spider can move through your website easier.
Another way to solve the problem is to create a site map
and connect it to your home page with text link. This will
drastically improve spider's ability to spider your website.
Your website is using Flash navigation menu. While images
can at least be linked to other pages, Flash navigation is
not crawlable at all. Use the same solutions that were mentioned
in number one.
Check your meta tags. It is possible that you are using robots
tag which might be blocking the spider. Make sure that if
you have one either remove it (you don't really need it,
spiders will still index and then follow to other pages on
your website) or put INDEX, FOLLOW inside the tag. It should
look like this:
Site Map.
Site map is a very useful thing for an website. It can benefit
your website in several ways. First, it will make your website
much easier to index; as a general rule search engine spiders
index pages much faster when you have a site map. Site map
is absolutely necessary if your website is using JavaScript
or Flash navigation and you don't want to get rid of it.
Site map will also help your visitors navigate your website.
Some of the pages they might be looking for a berried deep
in your navigation structure and site map makes them much
more accessible for everyone.
In you site map you should simply place
text links to all of your pages; you can organize them however
you want, even
group them if you like. In the link anchor text use keywords
that are relative to that page, it will help spiders identify
them correctly.
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