5 Tips For a Search Engine Friendly Website
By Christine Anderssen
If you are thinking of building a website, or you have already built a site, your first thought when you think about the project is that you would like your site to look good. Nobody wants a site that's ugly, that is a fact. Your site is the projection of your corporate image and you want to present the best possible image that you can. One of the main criteria therefore that you might use to choose a web design company is how pretty the sites in their portfolio are.
Regrettably, this focus on having a beautiful site often conflicts directly with another important website criteria, namely, that it should be search engine friendly. Remember, search engines are blind to the visual design aspects of your site, they concentrate mostly on the text and the internal structure of your site.
Here are some tips to ensure that your site is search engine friendly:
1. Ensure that your whole site is not built using Flash technology. Flash technology is great for spicing up a site, but if your whole site is built using Flash, the search engines will not be able to 'read' your site.
2. Make sure that the navigation of your site is not wholly dependent on Javascript or Flash (again). The search engines will not be able to follow all the links through your site and will therefore not be able to index all the pages in your site.
3. Ensure that your site has individual and descriptive META tags for all pages and that it is easy to update these for individual pages. The most important tags are the Title tag and Description tags. These need to describe the content of EACH page on an individual basis.
4. Ensure that your site has search engine friendly URLs. Some sites are built using software that generates the pages of your site using scripting languages such as PHP, or sometimes your sites is generated by a semi-automated tool such as a friendly site builder package. These are great for getting your site online quickly and easily, however, the page URLs that they generate for your site might be a very non-descriptive "page-2.html", or even worse, a whole line of gobbeldy-gook with no humanly readable meaning in it at all. So instead of your page about safari packages to Africa having the Internet address of http://www.yourtravelsite.com/safari-packages-to-africal.html, it might say http://www.yourtravelsite.com/index.php?com-category=2&id=4. Even though strictly speaking the search engines can read these pages, a website with search engine friendly URLs just seem to perform much better in the search engines, AND your site might attract more visitors through people clicking on a link that TELLS them immediately what the page is about.
5. Avoid using Frames to build your site. Luckily this type of design technique is fast fading into obscurity so the chances that your site will be built using this is slim these days. However, you might have a site that was built a couple of years ago, if your site is not doing as well as it should, you could check this aspect of your site.
Hopefully these tips will give you some guidelines on what to look out for when commissioning a new website. Christine Anderssen is owner of Tailormade4you, a web design and hosting company specializing in building cost effective websites for small business owners.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christine_Anderssen
If you are thinking of building a website, or you have already built a site, your first thought when you think about the project is that you would like your site to look good. Nobody wants a site that's ugly, that is a fact. Your site is the projection of your corporate image and you want to present the best possible image that you can. One of the main criteria therefore that you might use to choose a web design company is how pretty the sites in their portfolio are.
Regrettably, this focus on having a beautiful site often conflicts directly with another important website criteria, namely, that it should be search engine friendly. Remember, search engines are blind to the visual design aspects of your site, they concentrate mostly on the text and the internal structure of your site.
Here are some tips to ensure that your site is search engine friendly:
1. Ensure that your whole site is not built using Flash technology. Flash technology is great for spicing up a site, but if your whole site is built using Flash, the search engines will not be able to 'read' your site.
2. Make sure that the navigation of your site is not wholly dependent on Javascript or Flash (again). The search engines will not be able to follow all the links through your site and will therefore not be able to index all the pages in your site.
3. Ensure that your site has individual and descriptive META tags for all pages and that it is easy to update these for individual pages. The most important tags are the Title tag and Description tags. These need to describe the content of EACH page on an individual basis.
4. Ensure that your site has search engine friendly URLs. Some sites are built using software that generates the pages of your site using scripting languages such as PHP, or sometimes your sites is generated by a semi-automated tool such as a friendly site builder package. These are great for getting your site online quickly and easily, however, the page URLs that they generate for your site might be a very non-descriptive "page-2.html", or even worse, a whole line of gobbeldy-gook with no humanly readable meaning in it at all. So instead of your page about safari packages to Africa having the Internet address of http://www.yourtravelsite.com/safari-packages-to-africal.html, it might say http://www.yourtravelsite.com/index.php?com-category=2&id=4. Even though strictly speaking the search engines can read these pages, a website with search engine friendly URLs just seem to perform much better in the search engines, AND your site might attract more visitors through people clicking on a link that TELLS them immediately what the page is about.
5. Avoid using Frames to build your site. Luckily this type of design technique is fast fading into obscurity so the chances that your site will be built using this is slim these days. However, you might have a site that was built a couple of years ago, if your site is not doing as well as it should, you could check this aspect of your site.
Hopefully these tips will give you some guidelines on what to look out for when commissioning a new website. Christine Anderssen is owner of Tailormade4you, a web design and hosting company specializing in building cost effective websites for small business owners.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christine_Anderssen