Search Engine Friendly
Do you make it easy for Google to crawl your site? Read on for information on how to make your Web site more search engine friendly.
Is Your Web site Search Engine Friendly?
“Make sure your navigation links are in HTML, and not in Flash or Javascript. Search engines have trouble extracting links from anything other than HTML.” — X-Googler Vanessa Fox
From the point of view of computer visitors in the form of search engine bots, spiders, and crawlers, a Web page consists of the following factors.
- Server Response – How does the given hyperlink respond to a request?
- Server Errors – What percentage of the total hyperlinks on your site generate server errors? Should be less than 5 percent.
- Speed of Response – What percentage of the total hyperlinks on your site time-out, or are extremely slow loading? And, how often? Nobody likes to wait for a page to load, including Google.
- Google Considers Redirection a Negative – I bet that you didn’t know that. Use only 301 Redirections. 302, javascript, orbrowser extension redirection can make your pages land in thesupplemental index. Too many links being redirected and you got problems with Google.
- Does your hosting service use Re-Direction and or force the use of a single page title and description for the entire Web site? If yes, then you definitely have a fundamental Web site problem built into your site. You should change hosting services as soon as possible. In order to correct this obvious problem.
- Text – Google’s main Web index consists only of text. This means you need more than snappy graphics on your pages. You need at least one paragraph of readable text that talks about the topic of your page. Further, you should have lots of text for each hyperlink.
- Graphics – Graphics are ignored in Google’s main Web index unlessthey are using the alt text image tag. In other words, the only thing that Google indexes is text. So, provide all your hyperlinked images with text that can be indexed.
- Hyperlinks – Google is interested in every link on your Web site whether they are internal or external. Every page should be linked to your home page as well as to other pages on your site (known as your internal link structure). Orphan pages with no links should always be avoided. Every bad link is a nail in your Web site’s coffin. Too many nails, and your entire Web site will be 100% filtered out of Google’ Web page listings or SERPs. Do not ever try to help Google save time.Always specify the robots meta follow directive in every webpage even if you do not want it indexed.
From the point of view of search engines, a Web site is nothing but a collection of links that can be characterized by:
- A common URL domain name – Internal webpages use the same domain name in their respective URLs. External webpages have a different domain in their respective URLs.
- A Home Page – The home page is the top-most page in the Web site. For humans, it serves as the introduction to your Web site. But, for search engines it is the top node in your site’s internal linking structure. The home page should have only one URL which always end with a forward slash (i.e., “/”). Further, everyone of your Web pages should link to your home page using the same identical URL. This, also, means deciding upon whether or not you want to include www in the URL of your home page.
- “Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.” – Googler Matt Cutts
- Furthermore, every Web site should only have one top node. Do not try to confuse Google with more than one url being used as the home page, or by having an indexed html sitemap linked to every page. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as pagerank dilution.
- Internal Linking Structure – Does the Web page site navigation make the site completely crawlable for visitors and googlebot, or are there orphan pages?
- How are your internal links organized? Does it promote maximum pagerank for all your internal pages? Can most of your Web pages be reached with no more than 3 clicks of the mouse?
- Crawlability Rating – Every bad links reduces your site’s crawlability rating.
