Are You Sure Your Site is Search Engine Friendly
This sounds simple and obvious but you would be surprised just how many sites are not Search Engine Friendly
So why do you need to make sure your site is Search Engine Friendly
If you fail to make your web site search engine friendly then you can't expect the likes of Google, Yahoo or MSN to be able to crawl your site and index your separate web pages.
If you are serious about obtaining good rankings or top rankings for your website or even any rankings for your site then you MUST make sure your site is search engine friendly and all the Search Engines to reach every page of your site EASILY.
Amazingly many thousands of sites have been designed by inexperienced optimisation specialists and only look great but contain code and obstacles that will PREVENT and BLOCK the search engines automatic robots from reading your web pages. This is called Spiderability as the robots from the search engines ‘spider' your site by crawling through all your links and pages to determine what they are about and index them into their directory accordingly.
This Can be as simple as ensuring the following Are True
1. Are the Links on your site clear hyperlinks that are open for Search Engines to follow
2. Are all your pages on your site within 3 clicks or links from your Home Page
Lets deal with these 2 issues in more detail
Links need to be open doors as far as Search Engines are concerned
This sounds obvious but amazingly many links are ‘non standard' and closed to the search engines. Predominantly these have been created using Javascript code or links embedded within ‘Flash' animated files which will prevent Search Engines from going through and thereby creating a dead end.
These links should be constructed in simple code that will open the door to the search engine spider bots, at this time Google are the only spider that can actually read and unlock the code within Javascript or Flash Code but why make it hard and certainly Yahoo or MSN are unable to pick the lock to trawl your site pages and get past the Javascript or Flash Code.
The added problem is that while it is possible for Google can unpick the locks of these links with Javascript or Flash it is not clear if Google place any value on these links which it has to unpick to read and if you remember your page ranking by google is determined by links and therefore you MUST make it easy for them to read and to accredit to your site.
BE ABSOLUTELY SURE your links are clear of obstacles by coding them with normal href tags to make sure they are clear and open and counted by the search engines.
2. Be No More than 3 clicks away 1 ---> 2 ---> 3
Keep the links to all your pages as short as possible the further the chain of links to get to an important page. The simple rule is no more than 3 clicks away, the longer the links to the page reduces the chance of the search engine reading it or even finding it.
Important pages are those that have a call to action for your potential reader or customer.
This is why Site Maps have become more popular as a way to index all of your pages to enable the Search Engine Spidering bots which actually ‘look' for the page title site map as this gives the search engine an easier task of reaching all of your pages and therefore indexing them accordingly. Site maps also allow your customers to ‘see' all of your pages very like an Index in a book. Site Maps make sense so you need to create one.
By reducing the number of links to reach a page you also increase its user friendliness by your customers. Whilst site Maps help a great deal don't think they are the ‘fix all' to over come the obstacles of poorly coded links using Javascript or Flash. These must be rectified if you want to get on with the search engines. Remember All of the search engines use page link popularity to measure the importance of your website within their complication algorithms. Think about it another way try to ensure all of your important pages that you want to get found on the search engines are no more than 3 clicks away from the home page.
Your Home Page is probably the most important page of your site as it tells the search engine and reader what you do and why you are worth reading and the vast majority of links from other sites will be attached to your home page.
If your not sure then contact us for a free consultation and analysis your website it costs nothing to find out and could be the difference of climbing the search engine ladder.
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