 Designing Your Web Site to Maximize TrafficPublished Date: 2003-12-22 05:14:46 WorkOnInternet.com
Designing your site to maximize traffic from the search engines is not a difficult task but it does require you to think ahead and plan carefully your SEO strategy. If you have not yet built your web site and are still in the initial planning stages then you may have an easier time of it. If you already have an existing web site then you may need to take the time to read up on these SEO tricks and make some changes to incorporate them into your web site.
I will discuss 13 ways in which you can improve on your existing web site or boost a brand new web site into the stratosphere of high rankings. These are not really SEO tricks but rather tried, tested and true methods that we know to work effectively well. We all know that in reality there are no real SEO tricks. True success is achieved through hard work, research and implementation of a thorough and complete SEO strategy. Without further ado here is a checklist of important items to consider and implement into your SEO strategy. Using Java or Other Unspiderable CodeIf you intend to use Java on your web page it
is best to use it sparingly or not at all. Search engine spiders can not read
Java and it is possible that along with ignoring it when they come across it
on your page, they may also get hung up on it if you are using a lot of it.
If you really need to use Java you can safely use it by putting the Java code
into a separate JS file and calling it with a single line of code which you
place between your and tags within your web page. The code used to include your
JS file looks like this: Using Style Guidelines Effectively If you are using CSS style commands do not include
them within your actual web page source code. You don't want search engine spiders
to have to wade through 100 lines of unreadable code before they reach your
actual content. Instead place your style guidelines into a separate CSS file
and call them with a single line of code from within your and tags by using
the following code: Examine your web site from a source code point of view and ensure that your primary keywords or phrases will be spidered first. When search engine spiders read your page they read the source code just like we would read a book from left to right - top to bottom. We know that search engines place higher relevancy on keywords and phrases which appear closer to the top of a page so it stands to reason that if you've got a large table full of graphics appearing at the top of your source code before your primary keywords then you can achieve higher rankings by adjusting your layout and placing a well written search engine optimized paragraph above that table full of graphics. Spiderable Text Present on Each PageMany times I have seen some very pretty web sites but their chances of ranking high for any relevant keywords have been dashed by the use of only graphics and very little or no text on the pages. It is very important to your SEO strategy that you make sure that you've taken the time to write some quality textual content for your pages. Don't write nonsensical text filled with blatant spam. Instead take a few minutes extra and write 4-5 quality paragraphs which clearly explain the theme of your site and the particular page your writing for. If you feel you haven't got the time, ambition or skills to write your own content don't stress over it. There are other options. You could visit the SEO Copywriting forum at FreeSEOAdvice.com to ask for help and get some valuable tips. Or you could hire a professional team to handle the project for you. Check out eTrafficJams.com for help with your SEO strategy and copywriting needs. Proper Use of robots.txt FileI can recall several occasions when I have performed an initial analysis of a client's web site only to discover in the process that they had inadvertently blocked all spiders access to their web site by incorrectly formatting their robots.txt file. It is critical that you know what you're doing when you use a robots.txt file. If you are unsure as to what the correct syntax should be when modifying or creating your robots.txt file I recommend you do not use a robots.txt file at all. I realize this sounds counter productive but in reality it is much better to be safe than to be sorry. In the event that you accidentally did block the spiders, you would stand to risk losing all of your rankings and it would almost be like starting over again to repair the damage. If you need help correctly formatting your robots.txt file you can visit robotstxt.org for helpful tips. Dead Links and 404 ErrorsIf you are not checking regularly for broken links on your web site then you should start immediately and make this a part of your SEO strategy. No matter how certain you are you can never be 100% sure of your link integrity especially when your site has 100 pages or more. Aside from losing potential customers into a vortex of 404 errors you risk more than that from a search engine perspective. When a search engine spider visits your web site numerous times and finds broken links this gives the impression that your site is not maintained and not regularly updated. Not much is known for sure about exactly how the engines view this but I can tell you that your crawl status may be shelved to a low priority by the search engine spider if they come across this. In other words the spiders may not visit your site as frequently as they visit other sites who's link integrity is 100%. So make sure you download some link checking software and begin a regular schedule of verifying your link structure. Using Images For Primary Navigation LinksLots of sites like to use fancy looking navigation links but in doing so they under-utilize their web sites ability to establish a theme. For instance simply using a graphical link back to your home page would fail to tell the search engine spiders what that link is about unless the spider actually visited that page. If you used optimized ALT text on that graphical home page link then that would be a step in the right direction. But to maximize the effect and clearly define the theme of your web site you need to use a text link that has your primary keyword or phrase within the link text. This is called Link Reputation. Home, Site Map and Contact Page LinksThese are the 3 primary pages of your web site that should be top priority within your SEO strategy. You need these pages to be spidered and exposed to the visitors to your web site at all costs. To ensure that those pages get spidered you should place links to them near the top of your source code on every page of your web site. Your home page is of course the main entrance to your web site so you want that to be a focal point in the search engines. Your site map page should (if properly optimized) have links to all of your sub pages and use primary keywords belonging to each sub page within the link text pointing to those sub pages. Your contact page is of course just as important too because that's how potential customers will contact you to ask questions or order products and services. Redirected PagesSometimes when webmasters have no further use for a page they will redirect visitors hitting that page to another page. Search engine spiders take a dim view of page redirects. If you change the content of your site and find that you have no further use for a page do not place a redirect on that page. Instead remove the outdated content and replace the content with something relevant. Include a text link to the home page or to a new replacement page. When you remove a page or place a redirect on an outdated page you're cheating yourself out of extra rankings and traffic from the search engines. As soon as an engine discovers that you are redirecting traffic they may remove that listing from their index and you will have lost a steady stream of traffic that otherwise could have been converted into revenue. Excessive Small Type Font SizeUsing anything below font size 2 is normally reserved for copyright information and the legal jargon that you often see at the very bottom of a web page. Do not use anything below font size 2 for the majority of text on your page. Font size is a major factor in your SEO strategy because the font size you use will define the relevancy to which a search engine spider will apply to the content it finds on your page. For example heading tags (H1 through to H6) are indicative values to which search engines assign relevancy to the text included between those heading tags. Text surrounded with H1 tags will have a higher relevancy placed on it than text surrounded with H6 tags. To understand how on-page text is viewed with regard to importance and relevancy by search engine spiders you should check out www.W3.org for more information. Search engine spiders tend to follow the W3 HTML standard. Hidden Text, Door Way Pages and Other TricksNowadays search engines are pretty smart and it's pointless to attempt to pull the wool over their eyes. When you begin to plan your SEO strategy stop and examine your intentions for a moment. The rule of thumb is that if it looks like spam or could be perceived as spam then it probably is spam. The last thing you want to happen is for a competitor to spot your unethical approach on a search engine and then report you to that engine for abuse. If the search engine decided to take action you would likely lose everything. If there was any truth to your competitor's accusation the search engine would undoubtedly remove your site and ban you from their index entirely. So to ensure the longevity of your online business make sure you stay away from anything that looks unethical. Using HTML FramesIn short, don't. Frames are not very search engine friendly because search engines cannot read a framed source document that tells your browser to load more than one page in your browser window at the same time. Therefore it makes it hard to achieve a high PageRank on your home page. It also makes it hard for search engine spiders to find all of your sub pages too. Non-Spider-Friendly URL'sIf your web site uses characters within your URL's such as &, $, =, %, etc, or in other words if your page URL's are dynamic in nature then search engine spiders may have a hard time reading them. If a search engine spider cannot read your URL's then they most definitely cannot follow them to index your pages either. There are solutions available to fix this problem. For example if you are on a Unix operating system you can use Apache mod_rewrite to rewrite URL's that contain a session ID or other nasty characters into search engine spider friendly URL's. See this page for more information about how you can invite search engine spiders into your dynamic web site. Of course there are other things you can include in your SEO strategy to help your search engine rankings but if you directly apply to your web site what I have just told you in these 13 area's you will find that your rankings improve dramatically. About the author: Brendon Turner is a certified search engine optimization specialist and Senior SEO Consultant with eTrafficJams.com, a professional search engine optimization company that specializes in getting targeted, eager-to-buy traffic to your site! Brendon also maintains FreeSEOAdvice.com, a progressive SEO forum advocating access to accurate and timely information related to the industry. Want some tips on how to improve your web site's optimization? Call 877-785-9977 or click to request a free search engine optimization analysis.
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