Search Engine Friendly Websites

You can create a search engine friendly websites, by taking care of a few pointers. But, Creating a search engine friendly site does not necessarily mean that you will get top 10 listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a significant step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query.

How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Site?

Here are Important Ingredients of a Search Engine Friendly Site. You need to have

  • Create Relevant Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
  • Search Engine Friendly URLs
  • A Sitemap
  • Clean code
  • Avoid Blackhat SEO Techniques such as Hidden Text and text with very small fonts.
  • Add Alternate Text to Your Images
  • Avoid Flash and Videos

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs

Many sites these days are driven by a content management system. Every time you create a new page in a content management system, the system will create a web address URL for that page.

A search engine friendly URL will be a URL with words (and ideally search keywords in the URLs) that looks like...

http://www.example.com/international-travel-tips

A non-search-engine-friendly URL would use query string parameters instead. It looks like...

http://www.example.com/post?id=13

Search engines can parse the words contained within the search engine friendly URL. So it is helpful to have keywords in the URL. As you can see, the non-search-engine-friendly URL does not have the ability to have keywords in the URL and some search engines do not bother looking past the question mark symbol in the URL that indicates the start of the query string.

If your site is using a content management system that has the ability to provide search engine friendly URLs, you need to turn that feature on (Permalinks in case of Wordpress). If your content management system does not have this ability, find another content management system.

Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal all have this ability. Search engine friendly URLs are not always enabled by default. You may need to enable them in the administration settings.

When you turn on search engine friendly URL feature of your content management system, you will be able to customize the URL of your webpage to put these keywords in the web address.

2. Your site needs to have a Sitemap

You may have heard that in order for a site to be search engine friendly, you need to have a good menu navigation system that search engines can read directly in the HTML code, as opposed to menus that are dynamically generated by Javascript. This way, the search engine spider can start at the home page and navigate through each of your menu items to the other pages. This is true. What you have heard is correct.

However, by having a sitemap you accomplish the same goal and in fact provide an even more reliable way for the search engine spider to access each of your site pages. Now instead of needing to navigate through your menu system, the search engine goes straight to the sitemap which list all the pages of your site.

Basically Compliment your Java script attractive menus with a simple sitemap in your webpage or a simple menu somewhere at the bottom

3. Site needs to have Clean Code

Search engine has to read your HTML source code and determine which the main text content is. If your code is so convoluted that the search engine gets confused or can not decide which text is the main text, you are in trouble.

That is why you need to have clean code. In particular, the page layout should be coded in CSS tableless design instead of using tables as layout. Put CSS in an external CSS file instead of littering your code with snippets of inline CSS. Put Javascript in a external file as well.

Use semantic HTML code. That is to say use the HTML tags as they are designed to be used. Ideally, put the main text content as high up in the source code as possible.

Once your design is completed, it is a good idea to Validate your code using HTML and CSS validators.

4. Add Alt Text to Your Images

Don't forget to use alt attributes for images. Search engines cannot see the picture of your image, but rely on the text in the alt attribute of the image tag. This gives you the opportunity to put some keywords in the alt tags as well.

You should describe each picture in the "alt" text for the image.

<img src="name-of-image.jpg" alt="search engine friendly website">

Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags

Avoid Flash and Videos

Flash in your site can really attract visitor's but it is not spider-friendly. Robots will not index flash content site. Most search engine spiders are still unable to properly index Flash content. Search engine spiders are designed to read text and ignore images, so placing the majority of your site's content in a Flash file leaves most search engines without much content to read and use to determine your site's ranking.

All these tips help the search engine spider pick out the main text content of your page. And that is the goal of a Search-engine friendly web site design.

You may also want to look at Google Friendly Site Tips.