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As a layman, many websites are a visual treat. They have great
design, excellent navigation and mind blowing animation. But
are they really search engine compatible? A visually appealing
website is not always Search Engine worthy. The real challenge
for web designers is to create an attractive site that is
also search engine readable. This newsletter is an effort
to point out some common mistakes that affect websites from
showing up on search engine listings.
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| Use
of Image maps |
Search
engines operate through spiders. A spider comes to a web site
and loads the robots.txt file that tells a spider which pages
on the web site it shouldn’t access. Most spiders move
on to the homepage after analyzing this file. They then seek
various paths within the web site and index all the pages.
However, spiders cannot read Images. They
can only move to another page if there is a text link to that
page. Therefore, if all links are within images, it will not
know the rest of the web site exists and simply move on to
some other site, which is part of its never ending list.
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you can see, it is crucial to have text links to each main
section of your web site on almost all your pages. The easier
way of using images is Alt-Text. Alt-Text
links are readable by most spiders and they can be conveniently
embedded in images. The same applies to drop down menus that
lead to various sections of the site. Spiders cant read drop
downs so avoid them for navigating to other sections unless
there are other text links that lead to the same pages.
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Avoid
use of frames |
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Using
frames is a cardinal sin in the world of search engines. Frames
are popular among designers because they enable web site developers
to easily change content displayed on a site across all of
the pages by changing one master document. However, many web
site development softwares these days provide templates that
allow developers to change common features by only changing
one document. It is important that marketers revisit their
website and get frames out of the way. It makes for easier
handling and generates a lot more traffic which is the basic
purpose of the website.
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However, If you must use frames, which is rarely the case
then be sure to put optimized pages within the <noframes>
tag on each frameset page. However, managing this will be
a very laborious task, especially if the website is a large
one.
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Using Java scripts
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Search engines find it difficult to read Meta tags placed
after JavaScript on web pages. It is important for designers
to place all meta tags prior to the JavaScript code. Even
at an overall level, using JavaScript in the source code makes
it difficult for search engines to index text on the webpage,
so it is best to refrain from using Java script on pages that
need to be optimized.
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Horizontal Navigation Structure
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Keep
the pages you want indexed by engines on the higher tiers.
This basically means don’t place these pages in sub-sub
folders. Especially, if the website is large search engines
don’t index every page at every level so its important
to keep the pages you want optimized in the main directory
or at best one level down. Having a flat site structure is
one of the key tricks to creating a marketable website.
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| Play
it fair. Spamdexing does not work anymore |
Keyword
spamming, or spamdexing, are commonly used tricks by ignorant
designers who think they are smart. It is a common trick to
increase keyword frequency and relevancy and in turn obtain
a better search engine ranking on targeted keywords. Search
engines caught on to this rather quickly, however, and now
most of them penalize or even ban a site that attempts to
keyword spam.
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The
strategy of repeating keywords over and over again in various
positions of the page, usually in very small font size and
in the clour same as that of the background is very much detectable
and causes serious damage to search marketing efforts. Once
your site is blacklisted web spiders won’t come back
to it for a long-long time. So refrain from doing it. However,
it is surely a good idea to have high keyword prominence and
frequency. So instead of spamdexing, insert keyword-rich paragraphs
near the top of your page. Go one step further and use keyword
targeted phrases in a link to further improve visibility.
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These
are some tips that can improve website efficiency considerably.
It is essential for marketers to realize that there are a
dime a dozen website designers in the market today. However,
only specialists understand the nuances of the medium .
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