Designing a search engine-friendly web site
A user-friendly web site is usually one that is search engine-friendly, too. You should aim for:
- clean, uncluttered code
- a clear, focused message
- a creative framework
- simple navigation, which a novice Internet user can manage
Avoid unnecessary graphics. These dilute your message and make the page slower to load, which is bad for search engines and for humans.
Domain name and hosting
For efficient marketing, you will need your own domain name and reliable hosting. An unreliable server may mean that your site is unavailable when the search engine visits. Search engines use ‘spider’ robot programs to index web content. If your server is slow, the spider might visit fewer pages on your site.
Search engines index independent web pages better than pages allied to an Internet Server Solutions Provider (ISSP) (for example, yourdomain.freeserve.co.uk). In addition, if you change your ISSP once your site is established, it can be a daunting job to change all your web page names, and it can lose you business, too. It is well worth investing in a domain name.
Barriers to search engines
Frames
Designers like frames because they load quickly, are easy to use and allow the layout of the page to be closely controlled. Unfortunately, web sites that use frames are not search engine-friendly. It is also very difficult to measure how the individual web pages are used.
Cascading Style Sheets achieve most of the features offered by frames, but in a search engine-friendly way.
Flash
If you want your pages to be search engine-friendly or if you want to analyse how people use your site, then you must highlight this to your designer before they start working on a Flash site for you. They will need to embed Flash files into all the pages that you want to highlight. Flash is not yet widely indexed by search engines.
Content and copywriting
Use your own unique content
Always use your own content and copy in your web site if at all possible. Retailers often just use the text and images supplied by the manufacturer to all their stockists. From a search engine’s point of view, that material is the same on hundreds of web sites, and will be given less weight than your own unique content. You might even be penalised for content duplication.
A web site that is packed with information relevant to the target audience will stand you in good stead with search engines and users alike. Other webmasters will want to link to your site, bringing you long-term success.
How to write well for humans and search engines
Aim for around 200 to 250 words of body content for each page that you would like to see ranked in the search engines. Have keyword phrases in mind before you write your content. It should read well, and answer the needs of your prospective customers. Search engines are getting better with words and can now detect unnatural language patterns. Avoid putting in keyword phrases where they would not naturally occur.
Be sure to include powerful ‘calls to action’ to persuade your users to act as you want them to. A page may be well written, but it can lose all impact if people do not know what to do next.
Make your text easy to scan
On the Internet, people tend not to read word-for-word until they are very interested. At first, they jump from link to link or between other highlighted elements of the page, skipping most of the content. Highlight important parts by using bold, italics, bullet points and headings. These will all make your text easier to scan and help people to pick out the main points at a glance.
Update your site
When search engines check a web page, they store the information in large databases. As they systematically go through the web, they will revisit your web page. If they find exactly the same content when they revisit, they will return less frequently. If your content changes frequently, they will revisit more often. Even small changes can make an important difference.
Check for coding errors that can choke search engines
This tool will help you to check your site for coding errors, page by page:
Markup validator: http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html
Robots.txt files
If there are any pages that you do not want search engines to index, use a robots.txt file to prevent access. When it accesses your web site at first, a search engine will check if this file is present. It tells the search engine ‘spider’ (or robot) which files it may index.
You can test that your robots.txt file works correctly by using the following
tool:
Robots.txt validator: www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi
Note that an invalid robots.txt file can prevent search engine indexing altogether. Simply enter the full URL to your robots.txt file (for example, www.yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt).
Comply with search engine guidelines
Google has very clear guidelines on acceptable design and marketing techniques for web site owners and marketers. Following these guidelines will stand you in good stead with each of the major search engines.
Google’s webmaster guidelines: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
