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Make Sure Your Web Site is Visible to Google

Guest post by: Danny Hoffman

Article Overview: Easy to follow tips - how to design a "Search Engine Friendly" Web site. Make sure search engines can read and index your site.

Make Sure Your Web Site is Visible to Google

Here are some basic tips for designing Search Engine friendly Web sites: Most Important: Search engines read text, not graphics or FLASH designed to look like text. Without keyword relevant text in your page headings and paragraphs, your site is unlikely to rank highly for your important keywords. So don't make your pages 100% FLASH or graphics. Include actual keyword text on your pages.

1 Title and description tags:

a. The Title tag: 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 such and HTTP-EQUIV tags come after the title tag. The tag should be placed immediately after the tag. Schematically the page should be like this:

Html

Head

Title

Meta Tags if used, in this order: description>keywords

Head

Body

Body

Html

b. The description tag is less important but it also needs to be included so that an individual tag can be written for each page. The keyword tag is even less important (it's not even indexed by Google), but can be included after the title and description tags. It should also be possible to be individually updated for each page.

c. Most Other meta tags are usually not necessary, and most don't actually do anything. The meta "robots " and "update" tags are good examples of unnecessary tags.

2. Page URL's in dynamic sites: Try to avoid overly long URL's and use no more than 2 "call up" characters (such as = or ?) per URL. Especially try to avoid the "id=" , as this is most problematic for search engines. Google will not follow this call. If possible program the site so that the URL's can look static (no call up characters), even though they are dynamic.

This is vital in order to ensure that the SE's will index all your pages. Longer URL's with several stop characters will sometimes not be read and indexed by search engines.

3. Home page and site map: All sites should have a site map. Your home page and site map page should have static type URL's: www.xxx.com. . There should be a link to the site map from somewhere on the home page. Try to give your home page and site map static type URL's, even if they are dynamic pages: http://wwww.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/site-map.asp or http://mysite.com/site-map.html ;

These items are important as an extra precaution to ensure that the engines will read the links on your site and index all the pages.



4. Try to write the code of the page so that all scripts and as much programming etc are off page files such as text files that are called up by the file name in the code on the page. (e.g. navigation-menu-script.js) This prevents the SE seeing lots of "unnecessary" lines of code on the page.

5. Navigation: if the navigation is in a script, search engines won't read it. In that case a footer with simple href html links should be used, or some other method employed to introduce links to inner pages that search engine spiders can read.

6. Also, try to design the code so that the search engine reads the headings and body text before the navigation and header elements of the page. If the page uses tables this can be easily accomplished with the "rowspan" command.

This is very important, as SE's read pages from the top left corner of the page and down to the bottom right corner. The more prominent (that is higher up in the lines of code on the page) your headings and text containing are to the search engine, the higher ranking your page will get.

7. Home page content: Should not be all graphics or Flash. Some plain text containing keywords should be used. Otherwise the SE's will see no content to index (in, other words, they will see such a page as "blank".)

8. Again, remember - search engines read text, not graphics or flash designed to look like text. Without keyword relevant text in your page headings and paragraphs, your site is unlikely to rank highly for your important keywords. I hope this helps.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Danny

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Article Tags: search engine visibility, SEO, web site design, web site visibility, web site visible to search engine



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