Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming to it. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet are the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a site that is search engine friendly, you will be able to rank better in search engines and obtain more visitors.

To do this, you need to know one piece of technical information — what search engines use to list websites in their search results. Major search engines use programs called spiders, crawlers or robots to index websites. These spiders crawl a website by following links to a page, reading the content on the page and recording it in the engine’s database. When people do a search, they are really searching the web, but rather the search engine’s database of websites.

If you want your site to be indexed, it is important that you avoid things that will cause a spider to reject or ignore your website. Here are some things to do and to avoid.

Frames
Using frames often confuses search engine robots and they might even abandon your site rather than continue crawling it. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Put Import Information in Text
Search engine robots can only read text in your source code. For this reason you don’t want to important information in Flash movies or static images. If information must be presented visually, be sure to put appropriate keywords in the “alt” tag of your code. If you don’t know what that is, I’m sure your webmaster does.

Meta Tags
Use meta tags on each and every page of your website so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

This is one reason why WordPress can be so powerful. It automatically creates the meta tags for you, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting. Also, there are plugins you can add to WordPress that give you more control over meta tags.

Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
HTML code is evolving. Because of that, tags that were once legitimate are now no longer used. For example, modern HTML has moved away from formatting within the code and moved toward embracing cascading style sheets or CSS. With CSS you define your websites styles in one file and refer to it from each page. This gives you more flexibility in determining the style of your website, and makes it easier to make global changes to font size, color and other design elements. Using CSS also eliminates redundant HTML tags and makes your pages much lighter and faster to load.

If you would like help creating your website, check out the web design services I offer at DragonWyze Communications.