Website Architecture Back to Article When developing a website it is important to keep search engines in mind. Most search engines have guidelines on their sites for designers such as the Webmaster Guidelines on Google at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769, filled with a wealth of great design advice as well as things to avoid. You can't get better advice than that given directly by the people who actually built the search engine indexes that you wish to be included in. Use descriptive filenames for your pages that include keywords indicating the content of your pages whenever possible. For example toy-trucks.html would be preferable to category-5.html, as the search engines can more readily determine the content of the page. Be sure that you make your pages standards compliant; most search engines give some weight to pages that are constructed correctly. The less errors in the pages, the more likely you are to have a successful crawl. Not only does this help with search engine rankings, but it also aids in the cross platform integrity of your page design. Which ensures a consistent look and feel on all Internet browsers. There are many online utilities available to test the code in your pages for standards compliancy such as the markup validation tool at http://validator.w3.org/ or the CSS validation tool at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator. Be sure to use terms (keywords) in your page content that reflect the true content of your page. Use the most important keyword two or three times in the page. Be sure the use of the term flows smoothly like natural speech. Do not go overboard by placing the keyword in the page dozens of times, this gives you no advantage as this constitutes keyword stuffing or search index spamming and can potentially get your site banned from the search index. There are exceptions to this such as product lists which include the keyword in each item name; search engines are sophisticated enough to determine the difference. Use header tags such as <h2> or bold tags <b> to identify the subject of the page prior to the main text content; search engines key into these and identify them as important text to determine your content. Be sure to use your most important keyword for your page in these headers. Try to go as in depth as possible for all of your pages. The more content you have published on any given subject, the more authoritive your site looks to the search engines for that subject; but be sure that the content you use is of genuine use to your users such as in depth product or service descriptions, otherwise it could be considered search index spamming. Try to use important keywords in this content. Keep your most important content as close to the top of your pages as possible. The further down a page your keywords are seen the less precedence the search engine spiders and bots give them. Be sure to have a sitemap page on your website as search engines view them as a 7 course meal and will spider all the links from that page. |
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