Home > Tips > Search Engine Tips > Build a "Search Engine Friendly" Site
Build a "Search Engine Friendly" Site
Updated October 16, 2003
Building a search engine friendly
site is not overly complex, however, it does take understanding
the correct "blue print" for the system and you need
time. How much time? At least one year.
Just remember that Rome wasn't built
in a day, and neither will your Internet Empire.
Step One: Preparation
work, and lots of it. How much? We recommend a site
with at least 100 pages of content - real content, not
"fluff" pages like Contact Us, About Us, or your Privacy
Statement page. The real meat of your site should be
100+ pages.
Step Two: Your domain
should be one that is easily brandable. Forget about
having your keywords in your domain name, or having
dashes. They have never been less important to search
engines. If you want to use keywords in your domain
name, you can use third-level domains (i.e. http://search.engines.webmarketingnow.com)
instead.
Step Three: Site
design/speed. The simpler the better. While search engines
can crawl things they couldn't just last year, we advise
you to keep things simply by avoiding Flash, Java, and
complex JavaScript. This will allow the search engines
to crawl your site without the possibility of getting
"hung" and resulting in the crawler terminating.
A great example of a simple and effective
design is Google. Simple. Clean. Effective.
Site speed is the catalyst to a successful
site. Even if you have the best sales letter, the best
graphics, and the best marketing plan, it will all fail
if your site does not respond instantly to a request.
Even if that delay is a mere 3-4 seconds. That "New
York Minute" could mean a lost visitor and lost revenue.
It is estimated that for every second of wait time you
lose 10% of your visitors.
Step Four: Session
IDs. Does your site or shopping cart software require
a session ID to continue? If so, search engines will
bail out and go elsewhere. You can check your page
saturation at MarketLeap, and if Google only has
a handful of your pages indexed, session IDs may be
the issue.
Step Five: Same
Page Titles. Either out of laziness or a Content Management
System (CMS) page titles are the same throughout the
site. Google has been known to stop spidering sites
when the same title is detected repeatedly. Google looks
at this as dumping irrelevant pages into their index.
Most CMS systems like the Bright
Builder have the ability to modify the Title on
pages, even product pages.
Step Six: Required
Cookies. By forcing a visitor to take the cookie you
are planting on their machine, you risk losing the search
engine spiders. Why? They don't accept cookies, and
if you force one on them, they will just turn and go
the other way.
Step Seven: Test
Your Site. To get a glimpse of what a search engine
spider sees when it indexes your site, see the Lynx
Viewer. If you see major problems, such as very
little text, unclickable links, etc. you should make
adjustments to your site immediately. The viewer isn't
perfect, but it will allow you to see potential problems
that you wouldn't normally detect.
The "meat" of this article was supplied
by Brett Tabke of the Webmaster
World Forums.
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