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Making Your Website Search Engine Friendly

by Ryan Allis

The crucial aspects you must know, in no particular order, to make your website search engine friendly are: do not use frames, do not keyword spam, and make sure you have text links on every one of your pages.

Additionally, here is what you should avoid.

1. Do not use image maps without text links that follow.

Image maps are images or graphics in which different parts of the image are hyperlinked to a different page. Often many horizontal or vertical navigation bars are really single images (buttons) that take you to another section of your site when you click on a certain part of the image. There is nothing wrong with having image links. However, if you do, you must be certain you also have text links on each of your pages (especially your home page) to the same pages the image links to.

Search engines get their data through spiders. When a spider finds your web site it first loads your "robots.txt". The "robots.txt" file can be used to tell a spider which (if any) sections and/or pages on your web site it should avoid. Once the spider has finished with your "robots.txt" file, it will most likely move on to your home page. From there it will explore your web site and index all of the pages it finds (with usually a maximum of a few dozen). The problem is that the spider cannot "see" images, just text. It can only move to another page if there is a text link to another page. Therefore, if all your links are images, it will not find the rest of your site and will move on to the next site in its never ending list.

As you can see, it is crucial to have text links to each main section of your web site on every one of your pages.

2. Do not use drop down menus without accompanying text links.

On a similar note, spiders are also unable to follow the links that are in drop down menus. If you use a drop down menu to help the user select which section of your site to go to next, be sure to also use text links somewhere else on your page.

3. Do not use frames.

A cardinal sin in the world of search engines is using frames. Frames became popular a few years ago because they enabled web site developers to easily change content displayed on a site across all of the pages by changing only one document. Since then, web site development programs such as Dreamweaver have provided the ability to use templates. Coding, such as server side includes and global variables, have enabled more developers to change uniform features (such as design, navigation bars, or text footers) by only changing one document.

However, some web site owners have persisted in using frames. This will be detrimental to their search engine efforts. You see, frames start with a frameset. The frameset is simply code that tells the browser which two, or more, HTML files to display in the browser. The problem comes from the fact that the search engines are able to read the code in the frameset, but can't follow the code to the actual frames (the HTML files). This causes the frameset pages to receive very poor rankings. If you do choose to use frames, be sure to put optimized pages within the tag on each frameset page. Managing this will be very time consuming if you have more than a few pages. My best advice to you is to not use frames.

4. Do not use dynamic content on pages you want to be indexed.

Dynamic content is content that is generated on the fly from data in a database. They can cause significant problems for the search engines spiders, and in turn, cause your site to be penalized and cause your dynamic content to not be indexed at all.

Dynamic content is generally only used by larger sites or by an experienced developer's site. So if you have no clue what dynamic content is or how to use databases on your web site you shouldn't have any cause for concern. Dynamic content can usually be spotted by looking for the ? or & symbol in a page URL or a .pl, .cgi, .php, or .asp page ending.

There is no inherent problem in using dynamic content. What you must avoid is using dynamic content on pages you wish to optimize for the search engines. Also, if you are using dynamic content be sure you create a "robots.txt" file on your server in which you tell spiders to stay away from indexing this area of your site.

The reason search engines have problem with dynamic content is rather quite simple. Again, they are mindless spiders that follow text links. Since dynamic pages really are not "there", but rather created on the fly depending on what parameters are placed in the address a spider could potentially become trapped in a large database driven page. It would have to index the entire database and would be stuck in a loop until it did so, potentially crashing the site it was on. For this reason, most search engines have disabled the ability to index dynamic content. Google is the only engine that will index dynamic content; although it will only index the few pages before it forces the loop to stop and moves on.

The reason I mention this information on dynamic content is that there are quite a few very technically adept people out there who are able to create wonderful database driven web sites but do not learn about the marketing side until later. If you are one of these persons, simply make static copies of the dynamic pages that you will be optimizing and be sure to restrict the spiders through your "robots.txt" file.

5. Do not place JavaScript above your meta tags

Search engines often have trouble reading meta tags placed after JavaScript on web pages. If your web site uses JavaScript, be sure to place all of your meta tags above the JavaScript code.

In general, having JavaScript in your source code will make it more difficult for the search engines to find what they are really looking for- the text on your page. If possible, do not use JavaScript on your optimized pages, and if you must, do so sparingly.

6. Do not put optimized content deeper than three levels

Search engines typically only index the top three levels of any site. A level is simply a directory. For example if the address of a page is http://www.gardentips.com/garden/tips/growing/roses/info.html it will most likely not be indexed by the search engines as it was buried five levels deep. If you wanted the page to be indexed it would need to be located at something like http://www.gardentips.com/roses/info.html. Try to keep your navigation structure as flat as possible when creating your optimized pages.

7. Do not keyword spam

Keyword spamming, or spamdexing, was once a commonly known "trick" to increase keyword frequency and relevancy and in turn obtain a better search engine ranking on targeted keywords. Search engines caught on to this rather quickly, however, and now may penalize or even ban a site that attempts to keyword spam.

The strategy is simply repeating keywords over and over at the top, bottom, or margins of a page usually in very small (font size=1 or headline <H6>) type. Often this text would be made to be the same color as the background so that the visitor would not see it at all.

An example of keyword spamming could look like this:den tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping garden tips gardening landscaping

The hexadecimal code FFFFFF will make this text white. Assuming the background of the page is white, the text will not be visible to the reader.

This strategy simply does not work any longer and as mentioned may get your site banned from the search engines. Don't do it.

It is however, surely good to have high keyword prominence and frequency. So instead of doing the above, you could try inserting a keyword-rich paragraph near the top of your page such as this:

Come learn about landscaping and gardening in our garden tips section. If you have ever wanted to have great landscaping in your yard or a wonderful garden you'll not want to miss these garden tips.

These two sentences have all your targeted keywords multiple times without the risk of being penalized. Further, you have to use one of your targeted keyword phrases in a link, further increasing your prominence and relevancy.