Ensuring Your Website is SE Friendly

Web site designers and internet marketers are a divided lot these days. One of the primary questions in web site design has always been 'Who is your audience?'. It's a standard question for any marketer - knowing your audience is key to designing a site that will attract your market and get them to buy. The problem with that question when it comes to web site design is that there are TWO audiences for every web site - your intended market and the search engines. While your web site should be aimed squarely at the end user - your intended customers - approximately 85% of your customers will find your site through a search engine. That means that you need to make your web site friendly to the search engines as well as to the customers.

So just what is a 'search engine friendly' site? Search engines index your site through the use of 'bots' or 'spiders'. These are computer programs that crawl their way through the internet by jumping from link to link to link and recording the text on each page for their database. A search engine friendly site is one that makes it easy for the bots to find every page that you want your customers to visit. If the search engine bot can't find it, the search engine can't list it. There are some standard tips that you can use to ensure that your web site is search engine friendly. If you're employing an SEO company, they should be focusing part of their efforts on making sure that these tips are followed.

1.Include static site menus on each page of your web site. You can use a menu bar at the top of your pages, text links in the footers or a sidebar with static text links, as long as it ensures that the search engine bots can get to every important page on your site. The added bonus to this - it's not just Google, Yahoo and MSN that will like this. Your customers will love being able to find pages easily and hop from section to section.

2.Create a site map and link to it in your static menu. A site map will include links to all the pages on your site. Google even makes it easy for you to get your sitemap indexed through its webmaster pages.

3.Avoid spam pages on your site. Pages that are little more than pages of keywords are not only disappointing to your customers, they can get you penalized by the search engines.

4.Use search engine friendly URLs for your pages. Dynamically generated URLs, like those used for most blogs or in content management systems, aren't always followed by the search engine bots. The major blogging platforms and CMSs now offer the option of creating SEF URLS. Use it.
5.Use text. The search engine bots can't read images or flash movies. As cool as they might look to your users, they do you no good at all in the search engine world. Use ALT tags for your images, and make sure to include 250-500 words of text on each page that you want indexed.

6.Keep your page loading times low. If your pages time out before Google or Yahoo can fetch them, they won't be indexed.

7.Use external files for your javascript and CSS rather than putting them into the headers of your pages. Including them in your headers pushes the text that your users will see - and that you want the search engines to read - further down on the page.

SEO companies are specialists in making sure that all of those factors are present on your web pages, and that they are easy for the search engines to find when they're indexing. The very best SEO services will do more than give your pages a once-over brush-up. They'll suggest strategies to help you achieve a higher search engine ranking through linking strategies, offer you advice on navigation and site structure and help you understand the process of creating web sites that are indexed completely so that you get the most out of your search engine advertising.

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