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Optimizing_Your_Websites_Design_For_Search_Engines
| Optimizing Your Websites Design For Search Engines
It is a well known fact that big search engines like Google are
paying the most attention to the links that point back to your
website. However, that does not mean that your website design
does not matter. You should take a break from looking for link
partners and invest some time in optimizing your website's
design; it will pay of in the long run. Below you will find some
tips on how to optimize your layout in order for search engine
spiders to crawl your website correctly.
Use of images in search engine optimization process.
The most important thing to understand about search engines'
spiders is that they can only read text. That means that
whatever text you have inside the image will not be read by any
spider. Of course, website without images will be boring to look
at but be careful not to put important text inside the image. It
is relatively easy to surround your body text with images to
make it look as if the text is part of an image without hurting
your search engine ranking chances. Discuss these things with
your web designer.
Create meta tags.
Creating meta tags is the next step toward successful search
engine optimization. Meta tags are designed to give search
engine spider in idea about your website before it actually
crawls the body of the page itself. Meta data gives the spider
title of your page, short description and the keywords that are
relevant to that page. Notice that the word "page" is used here;
spiders look at each page of your website separately. Here are
some examples and explanations on meta tags:
SEMBooster.com
TITLE - that's the title of your page. Do not make it too long
and don't try to put too many keywords in it. Never the less,
you should have 1-2 of your major keywords in the title.
DESCRIPTION - that's the description of you page. It should be
1-2 sentences and should make sense because search engines like
Google use it when displaying your listing, along with title tag.
KEYWORDS - that's the keywords that relate to your website. Make
sure you put keywords that have been used in the body of you
page. If you put keywords that are nowhere to be found on your
page some search engines might penalize for it and filter out
your website.
Use style sheets.
Today using style sheets or CSS is a common practice but you
still better make sure your website is using one. Style sheets
help you clean up your code and remove font tags that might
cause problems with spiders. In the past webmasters filled pages
with tons of keywords in the tiny font size and therefore search
engines started to penalize for it. Using CSS ensures that all
text is of the same size as well as spider is concerned;
visually all fonts will look different. Now webmasters are even
building the whole sites on CSS.
Image alt tags.
Image alt tags are an important part of your website
optimization. Image alt tag contains text that you see when
moving your mouse over the image. It is also the text that is
used to describe an image if your website's visitor has images
disabled. Because search engine spiders can't read text inside
the image, it reads alt tag as a way to understand what the
image is about. It seems that search engines are not penalizing
for stuffing alt tags with keywords but be careful not to
overdue it. Here is how it looks:
H tags.
H tags or headings have been known to increase website ranking
for a while now. But is it really so? We have strong reasons to
believe that h tags (mostly H1 tag) do not get you better
ranking. They are, however, a great way to organize content of
your page so it is not very surprising that some webmaster still
think they can bring better ranking. Also, using keywords in H
tags will increase your keyword density. So by increasing your
keyword density and organizing your content, you can actually
get better ranking but it is not thanks to h tags. There are a
lot of website owners that complain that H tags are difficult to
work with. Our advice to this is: "Don't use them if you have no
place to put them or if you don't have much content to
organize." There are plenty of high ranking websites that don't
use H tags at all.
Your website's navigation.
Make sure it's crawlable. People often build a website but soon
realize that search engine spider does not go any farther then
index page. Even though you have links to most of your pages
from the home page spiders might still have difficulty indexing
your pages. There are several reasons why this happens:
Your website is using JavaScript navigation menu. If you have
drop down menus in your navigation then it is surely designed in
JavaScript. JavaScript is not crawlable by search engine
spiders, therefore spider cannot index your other pages. There
are several ways to fix this problem. Try adding simple text
links to your major pages at the bottom of your home page so
that spider can move through your website easier. Another way to
solve the problem is to create a site map and connect it to your
home page with text link. This will drastically improve spider's
ability to spider your website. Your website is using Flash
navigation menu. While images can at least be linked to other
pages, Flash navigation is not crawlable at all. Use the same
solutions that were mentioned in number one. Check your meta
tags. It is possible that you are using robots tag which might
be blocking the spider. Make sure that if you have one either
remove it (you don't really need it, spiders will still index
and then follow to other pages on your website) or put INDEX,
FOLLOW inside the tag. It should look like this:
Site Map.
Site map is a very useful thing for an website. It can benefit
your website in several ways. First, it will make your website
much easier to index; as a general rule search engine spiders
index pages much faster when you have a site map. Site map is
absolutely necessary if your website is using JavaScript or
Flash navigation and you don't want to get rid of it.
Site map will also help your visitors navigate your website.
Some of the pages they might be looking for a berried deep in
your navigation structure and site map makes them much more
accessible for everyone.
In you site map you should simply place text links to all of
your pages; you can organize them however you want, even group
them if you like. In the link anchor text use keywords that are
relative to that page, it will help spiders identify them
correctly.
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