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5 Tips for a Search Engine Friendly Site

Written by: Roger Bauer

Article Overview: Designing a website can be a daunting task if you’re new to the game and have little time to research the proper ways to develop a site that is both user and search engine friendly. After-all, what good is a website if no one can find you? This article contains some things to avoid if search engine traffic is a priority.

5 Tips for a Search Engine Friendly Site

Designing a website can be a daunting task if you’re new to the game and have little time to research the proper ways to develop a site that is both user and search engine friendly. After-all, what good is a website if no one can find you? Below are some things to avoid if search engine traffic is a priority.

Frames

Frames are pages within a page. Search engine crawlers, spiders, or bots (small pieces of code the engines send out to inventory websites) read a frameset as one page with very little content. Just because you can’t see the frames distinctly when viewing a page online doesn’t mean the search spider sees the site as a human does. If you want to see the site as a crawler does, right click on the main area of the page in question and view the source code of that page. Avoid frames especially for main/home pages of a site.

Flash

Flash is a very cool and hip way to do a page as it can incorporate interactivity and entertainment into a site or page, but it has little value to a search crawler. The fact is a search crawler cannot read a Flash page or component so all of that content and interlinking you worked so hard to develop earns you nothing in terms of search value. Your viewers may love your site, but you’re unlikely to attract new viewers without the help of the search engines. One caveat: it’s okay to mix in some Flash, but stay way from pure Flash for your website if your goal is to attract the masses.

Java-script Navigation

Search crawlers can’t execute lines of code therefore they won’t be able to navigate your site if you implement a lot of Java-script to guide users. The purpose of a crawler is to inventory a website to report back to the engine what it found. Once the search engine has a pretty good inventory of a site, it can mix that site in with the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a given keyword phrase. Try to make the crawler’s job as easy as possible by limiting the amount of scripting navigation per page. If you insist on using scripting for navigation, make sure you have some form of HTML navigation visible as well. At worst, have an HTML link on each page to an accurate site map for your site.

Dynamic URLs

Most search engines will not list dynamic URLs in their results pages. Dynamic URLs are typically used for database driven sites or script based sites. The above paragraph outlines the reasoning behind avoiding scripts, and dynamic URLs are no different. If you must use dynamic URLs, try to have a main page that doesn’t so that the search engines can find you.

Image Map Navigation

Search crawlers frequently get stuck within image maps and can’t accurately inventory your site. Stick with standard HTML navigation schemes if at all possible.

When designing your site, keep in mind that it needs to be easy to navigate for users and search engine crawlers alike. A slick site is of little use if no one can find you especially a search engine crawler.

Related Articles
  Write Search Engine and user Friendly Content
  What is Search Engine Optimisation?
  Just Because You Don’t Want To Hear It, Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t True
  An Introduction To The Art Of Search Engine Optimization
  Search Engine Friendly is NOT Search Engine Optimized

Article Tags: caveat, daunting task, designing a website, flash flash, flash page, frames frames, interactivity, java script navigation, keyword phrase, navigation search, page search engine, search crawler, search crawlers, search engine results, search engine traffic, search engines, search spider, serps, site flash, small pieces



Related Forum Posts
Re: Search Engine Tips and Ideas - Share Yours - Hi there, I answer this post, to start off. I am still learning a lot on all these subjects. Moreover, we have a wonderful tool to find out from previous posts. On the top right corner, use 'Advanced Search' and write 'Search Engine Tips'. It brings up all the previous posts with that information. Check it out. You will be surprised all the inherent information stored.
What Do You Want To Be Taught? - Hi, My name is Jeff Foster, I will be moderating this new section. I want to get your opinion on topics you would like to discuss & be taught on. I see a great need for small business owners to learn how to perform basic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which would include the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you want to be taught on? Jeff
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Re: Search Engine Optimization - If you are interested to get more information about Search Engine Optimization you can visit Search Engine Watch site gives you a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the search engine world. This site provides a ton of information about a very wide range of subjects related not only to search engine optimization, but also the flip side of the coin; subjects related to searching online.
Most Useful SEO Tools For Webmasters - Hi, My name is Jeff, I work for WebBizIdeas.com and we are developing an article called "50 Most Useful SEO Tools for Webmasters." We have ranked & listed our top 30 SEO Tools but want to get your opinion on what SEO Tools are most useful to you; as Internet Business Owners. Google Webmaster Tools Google Analytics Google Alerts Yahoo Site Explorer SEOBook.com Keyword Research SEOBOOK.com SEO For Firefox Tool SEOBOOK.com Search Engine Rank Checker SEOBOOK.com Back Link Analyzer SEOChat.com Keyword Difficulty Compete.com Quantcast.com Alexa.com Archive.org Stompernet Site Seer Technorati.com PRWEB.com ADDTHIS.com SHARETHIS.com EzineArticles.com Scribd.com Squidoo.com YouTube.com StumbleUpon.com Reddit.com Digg.com Del.icio.us Wikipedia.org Flickr.com NewsVine.com Yahoo Answers NOTE: When you list your answers please include a description on what the site is, why it is important to you, and your experience please....we may include it in our article. Jeff


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