Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Friendly Pages:

There are two main reasons to build a website.

One is to showcase you and your business and acts as a 'shop window'. Visitors can view your website when directed via off-line methods such as flyers and business cards.

The second reason is to generate more clients via 'natural search' offered by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista to name but a few. By designing a search engine friendly site, it will be easier to obtain better rankings within the search engines and  therefore generate more visitors.

The larger search engines have software that use 'robots' to index websites and to list them on their search result pages. The 'robots' or 'spiders' follow any links to a web page, they read the content of that page and make a record of it in their own database, displaying that listing as people search for that term.
 
In order to make your website 'index' more easily, you should avoid building a website based on 'frames'. In essence, a frame is a single page website with other pages built within the frame. Although this method of building websites was once popular, it is now outdated (superseded by CSS - see below) and can actually cause the search engine robots to avoid your site as they find it difficult and in some cases, impossible to navigate and index relevant pages. Where the robots can access a frame site, it becomes difficult for visitors to bookmark or save pages to their 'favourites' without using very long and confusing scripts.

Avoid the use of Flash movies or images when trying to present important information. The Search engine robots can only read text from the source code of a website. Data presented via Flash or an Image cannot be read by the Robots so if the text is being used for Search Engine Optimisation, you ranking in the search engine results pages will be severely affected.

It is important to use meta tags on each and every page of your site in order that the search engine robots know instantly what that particular page is about and whether the page should be indexed or not. When you use meta tags, the Robots task is simplified and there is much less scope for error. As a consequence, the Robots will re-visit your site more regularly and will return better search results for a potential customer. This will ultimately increase your quality score and page rank over a period of time.

Make sure that your website designer is using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is a more efficient and effective way of building natural search engine optimisation as the most relevant text will be listed on the websites source code in order of priority. CSS also has the effect of reducing unnecessary HTML tags and will allow your web page to load faster. One of the recently introduced metrics used by Google to assess website design for listing is the speed the a website loads. Therefore this is an important consideration. 

A new article on Keywords and the use of Keyword-Rich content will follow.

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