The INTco.biz Search Engine FAQ
The effect of website design
on search engine performance
Valuable advice and guidance which is worth noting can be found on the webmaster sections of the main search engines. The following is based on this advice:
- Make a site which has a clear hierarchy
- Use text links - every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. Take a look at Google's new SiteMap BETA and related tools such as the Google Sitemapper software from CoffeeCup Software.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Research the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links
- Check for correct HTML
- If you use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs - Google doesn't include these pages in their index.
- Keep the number of links on any one page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
- Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
- Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
- Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
- Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the search engine crawlers. (Visit www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.)
- If your website employs a content management system, make sure that
the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can
crawl your site.