April 28th, 2007 - Building an SEO Friendly Web Site
Here’s a first draft of an article that ran in BizTech magazine last year. The final version is here.
While the blame often lands squarely in the lap of the webmaster or IT manager, creating a site that ranks well for search engines requires an orchestrated effort from writers, developers, designers, PR and more. But if you focus first on what you can control, you can lay the groundwork for the efforts of others by ensuring that your site will be indexed properly.
Your first step should be to determine how thoroughly your site is getting explored by the automated searchbots that search engines use to find and index websites. In Google, search using the allinurl prefix (“allinurl: site name”) and you’ll see how many of your site’s pages are indexed. If your website has roughly 200 pages and Google has just 12 in its index, something is clearly inhibiting Google’s ability to index your pages.
Another quick test is PageRank flow. PageRank is simply Google’s measurement of the relative importance of your site pages (based largely on links pointing to the page). You can see PageRank using the Google toolbar. In a typical tree-structure site, you should see PageRank dropping by a few points for each tier of your site. For example, your homepage is a PR 5, the top tier is a 3 and the next tier a 2. If PageRank is “unranked” that page has not been indexed by Google. Bouncing through your site while monitoring PageRank is an excellent way to determine where a searchbot may be missing valuable content on your site.
Noticing any issues? You may have encountered one of the:
Five inhibitors to SEO
Flash-based development: The hotel franchise group at Cendant takes its website seriously. For the owners of popular hotel franchise brands like Ramada, Days Inn, Travelodge, Wyndham Worldwide and Howard Johnsons, each web visitor is potentially a $1,000,000 franchise sale. Despite a stylish Flash-driven site, web stats showed that all traffic from search engines landed only on the homepage. By re-working the site into an html template, with Flash animation on the page, the team was able to preserve the slick look and get all site pages indexed by search engines. The results were impressive. Search referrals landed deep in the site, closer to the type of content they were looking for, and search traffic went up 77% within just one month. Today the site ranks well in highly competitive search terms and online lead generation is up 600% from last year.
“With our strong brand of franchises, we know that we just need to be part of the consideration set of potential franchisees, most of whom conduct research online,” says (Name, Title). “By taking the right steps to position us well for search engines, we’re acquiring a high volume of quality leads at a very low cost compared to other sales channels.”
Flash takes a beating in SEO circles because it does not get indexed well by search engines. An important lesson from this effort is that Flash can be used successfully to deliver a strong brand impression within a framework that lets you obtain excellent search results.
Javascript: If you are using javascript functions to pull in page content (such as a news feed) it’s highly unlikely that the on-page content generated by the javascript will get indexed. Google reads html text and follows links – it will not parse through code in a deductive manner. This can particularly be a problem when using javascript for your navigation menus.
Dynamic sites: If your site’s URLs involve multiple parameters (often demarcated with a ? symbol), your pages may not get indexed. Generally one or two variables are fine, but with three or more there is a risk that your page will not get indexed.
Text in images: Words that are displayed as a jpeg or gif image (rather than actual html text) will not be indexed. You’ll often see navigation menus designed this way, and some stylistic sites will even include multiple paragraphs of text as an image to preserve a consistent look. The aesthetic appeal is costly, as your page will be less relevant than others that include similar wording as text. By using style sheets you can often apply the style you desire to text without using images.
Frame-based sites: When I began working with digital signage agency Digital Display & Communication Inc., we found that their site was getting indexed — a little too well. The 25-page site had over 400 pages listed in Google, a symptom of a frame-based site. Instead of indexing pages as a whole, Google treats each frame as a page, reducing the site’s relevancy for search. By moving out of a frameset, the whole proved much stronger than its parts and DDC gained some prominent search engine results, tripling site traffic and generating 85% of traffic from search engines.
“We made a decision to use an SEO-driven strategy to get in front of new North American prospects, and that decision is really paying off,” says Steve Harris, Vice President, Sales and Marketing. “We’re getting 12 times the volume of leads from our previous site, and the bulk of our new leads come in from the Web.”
To combat the five SEO inhibitors, and improve your search results in general, try these:
Simple Best Practices for SEO
Use a sitemap: A sitemap is a wonderful tool for SEO. If a searchbot can get to this page it will follow all the text links on it and index all of the underlying pages.
Add text links: Optimization problems arising from javascript or Flash-based navigation can often be easily addressed by adding text links to your main site pages in the page footer.
Use full URLs: URL canonization simply means that Google will consider url.com, www.url.com and www.url.com/index.html as different pages, even though they all host the same page content. This reduces your page’s impact by sharing PageRank among the three URLs instead of one. Use the full URL consistently in all links.
Create SEO-friendly URLs: In a typical web administrator or producer role, you often don’t have control over the page content, but you often can control the folders and filenames of your pages. Search engines will derive relevancy from these, so use words that accurately describe the content and that fit with the keywords someone might use to search for this content.
Rewrite Complex URLs: If your site suffers in search results because of long database-driven URLs with several parameters, consider using a URL rewrite engine such as Apache’s mod_rewrite to create more search engine friendly (and user friendly) URLs.
April 28th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Some nice Simple SEO Best Practices. Thanks for posting!
April 29th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Wanted to compliment on your site, it looks really good .
Hank
June 19th, 2007 at 5:34 am
Re Frame-based sites if Google sees all content in different frames 16 times will it remain able to see it as normal content or as duplicated content?
June 19th, 2007 at 5:53 am
Hi Frits, Google would see the exact same amount of duplicate content with frames as without. The problem with frames is Google won’t connect them together to represent an indexed page. It will look at each frame as a page basically. This will reduce your keyword relevance by breaking your content into small pieces.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Hmmm…. , i was searching for internet dating flash animation and i came across your post and it is definitely the most sensible thing i have seen in a long time, and in my opinion you got something good going here, i have to get my friends to subscribe to your post .
February 10th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Excellent post, it says it all in just a few words.
February 11th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
SEO is the way to go!… Great info here, guy!
February 12th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I have been looking for a “short list” of SEO rules and this is quick and to the point. While your suggestions seem to be common sense it is amazing how many people don’t do the basics. (And i have been guilty before too!)
Thanks
February 14th, 2008 at 2:52 am
I read your post with interest. I run both an .xml and .htm sitemap on all of my sites. I think this should overcome all the problems you listed. Correct? I have one site that has a very long list of movies in the menu. It is becoming more and more difficult to update the menu on the pages. Would including both sitemaps overcome the limitations of the iframe tag?
February 14th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Dan,
Great advice. I am currently using XsitePro to build my sites and I can tell you that this software is right on SEO. It has a built in function to optimize your pages right on the spot. I managed to get many fist page positions in Google for various keywords. The latest is No.1 for the phrase “internet marketing explained best bonus”
Also I just purchased the newest Brad Callen’s SEO Mindset and hope to get the best advice there is out there. Unfortunately there are too many Myths spread around by the so called “gurus” who do not know much about SEO but are selling “crapolla” as good advice.
One thing I also noticed that helps is to submit your sitemap through their “Webmaster Tools” as often as possible when you update your site. The reason is that it gets indexed right away. For instance may site was indexed last on January 9th but have updated many pages and added new pages on Feb. 12, So after I resubmitted the sitemap in a couple of hours the new pages were shown as indexed. Rather then wait for Google to index which is not often I keep submitting the sitemap just to say “hey I am here and I have mew content” It works well.
Thanks for the advice.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:46 am
Very nice tips for someone who want to build SEO friendly site. I would also like to mention for webmasters to give more attention to title and description as most import part by scoring for certain search term and increase SERP.
February 28th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
well, this could have been a webpage with information copied from 2001 or 2002
March 24th, 2008 at 10:57 am
I think this was a very sensible and useful article. It tells the basics and is a great start for anyone to follow and expand upon.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.