Building Search Engine Friendly Website Pages

Building Search Engine Friendly Website Pages

There is no point in building a website unless you get visitors. 65% of first-time traffic to a site now comes from Google. Yahoo! and MSN the two next rivals share 25% of the remainder of the market and are now a long long way behind. So, if you want to attract traffic to your site, at the moment that means playing by the rules Google sets. By designing a Google- friendly site, you will be able to rank and obtain more visitors. (ANd yes, you still can).

Google uses programs called spiders to 'crawl' websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links through pages, reads the contents of the page and take 'snippets' of relevant words to record it in its own search database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you therefore need to tell Google what the site is about and ensure your code is easy to read. Google made its reputation by providing fast, accurate searches. So tip #1 is Use meta tags on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and can 'snippet' the site content in a more relevant way. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's 'interpretation' job easier.

Tip #2 is if your code is hard to read even to the human eye, chances are Google is going to ignore it. To this end, avoid using frames on your website. Frames confuse search engine robots and they might abandon your site because of that. Frames also make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site. Also for the same reason, place Java at the end of the Body, not at the beginning.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Unlike the human eye, Search engine robots can only read text on your source code, so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically because the spiders simply won't be able to read it.

Stop using incorrect HTML tags like "Font" to style your page. This is 'old' generation HTML. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient and take the styling out of the body of the page - thus making it easier for the robots to read. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

About the Author: Richard Martin of Briquesetclics is a Certified Management Consultant and Accredited Internet Marketing Consultant of 20 years experience in IT. Briquesetclics offers exquisite eBusiness solutions, website design and Internet Marketing with English to French Translation to expat and French Comunities in Southwest France. He serves the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine regions and the cities of Limoges, Poitiers, Bergerac, Perigueux, Angouleme, Cognac, Bordeaux, Niort.

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