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 programme 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.
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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. |
