How To Ensure The Search Engines Find Your
Website
One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine
optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your
website are as accessible as possible to the search engines.
It's not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but
also the internal pages within a site's structure. The internal
pages of a site often contain important content such as
products, services or general information, and therefore can be
uniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy access
to these pages is vital.
There are many do's and don'ts involved in ensuring all
of your pages can be found by search engines. However, it is
important to first establish how the search engines find and
index web pages.
Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or
"spiders") to find content on the web for inclusion in their
index. A robot is a computer program that can follow the
hyperlinks on a web page, which is known as "crawling". When a
robot finds a document it includes the contents within the
search engine's index, then follows the next links it can find
and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in
mind, it becomes apparent that the navigational structure of a
website is important in getting as many pages as possible
indexed.
When considering the navigational structure of your site,
the hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines
judge what they feel to be the most important pages of a site
when considering rankings and a page's position in the site
structure can influence this. The homepage is generally
considered the most important page of a site - it is the top
level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From
here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are
within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most
important pages should be one click away, the next important two
clicks away and so forth.
The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together.
Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links,
meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit
buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query
strings that have two or more parameters are also typically
ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated
website.
The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic
HTML text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but
the text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe
the destination page - an optimisation plus point. Image links
are also acceptable but the ability to describe the destination
page is diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much
ranking weight as anchor text.
The most natural way to organise content on a website is
to categorise it. Break down your products, services or
information into related categories and then structure this so
that the most important aspects are linked to from the homepage.
If you have a vast amount of information for each category then
again you will want to narrow your content down further. This
could involve having articles on a similar topic, different
types of product for sale, or content that can be broken down
geographically. Categorisation is natural optimisation - the
further you break down your information the more content you can
provide and the more niche key phrases there are that can be
targeted.
If you are still concerned that your important pages may not
get indexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your
website. A sitemap can be best described as an index page - it
is a list of links to all of the pages within a site contained
on one page. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it
gives a robot easy access to all of the pages within your site.
Just remember - robots typically can't follow more than 100
links from one page, so if your site is larger than this you may
want to consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.
There are many considerations to make when optimising
your site for search engines, and making your pages accessible
to search engine robots should be the first step of your
optimisation process. Following the advice above will help you
make your entire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple
rankings and extra traffic.
About the Author:
Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for
UK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. Clients of
WebEvents benefit from a range of services designed to maximise
ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit
http://www.webeventseurope.com. |
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