weblaunchphxx
Posted 2007-09-12 07:47:51
1. Use as much text as possible in the form of HTML - Search engines love plain text. They are not able to read images, video files, audio files or flash, so try to not use too much of these in your site design.
Another thing to consider is that some sites make users log in in order to view certain content or use a form to find content. Both of these are bad. Spiders/crawlers do not know how to log in to your site or fill out a form in order to find your content. So if you want your content to be indexed by the search engines, stay away from this. If you MUST do this, try to produce a snippet of the content to entice users to log in. That way the spider at least has something to chew on.
2. Make your urls understandable - This means creating urls such as www.mysite.com/how-to-bring-up-your-children.html and NOT www.mysite.com/children/article-09876R-YTUR-4tr.html. As you can see the first url is not only \\\"user friendly\\\" but is also \\\"search engine friendly\\\" meaning that the search engines read more meaning and relevance into this url than the second one. Dont forget also that if you were to copy the second url into an email, your signature or post on a blog etc it wouldn\\\'t be totally clear where the link was going. This cannot be said for the first url.
3. Structure your site well - This means making your site as flat as possible. Instead of structuring your site in way that means a user has to click 10 times before reaching their target make the content a maximum of 4 clicks away or less.
4. Design your site for users NOT search engines - As much as possible treat the search engines as if they were human beings manually scouring your site for content to index. If it is easy for humans to find what they are looking for on your site, logic says that the spiders will also find what they are looking for and index it. The more \\\"speedbumps\\\" you put in the way of spiders, the slower your site will be crawled and indexed (if at all).
5. Content is king - One of my favorite expressions which is so true. Great content has many benefits, after all, its what we are all after, even the search engines. The search engines job is to find \\\"relevant\\\" search data. When the search engine starts dishing out \\\"irrelevant\\\" results, thats the time when it is going to become out of favour with web users who will move onto another engine.
Grapihic design Search engine optimization