Creating A Search Engine Friendly Web Site

One of the first steps to gaining top search engine rankings is to ensure that your site is compatible with current search engine technology. There is little point in attempting optimization if search engine spiders are unable to spider your site effectively.

What is a search engine spider?

A spider is a web browser similar to Netscape, Internet Explorer or Safari but rather than displaying the web page on your monitor it saves it to a database where it will be evaluated and scored by proprietary search engine algorithms.

Spiders traverse the web by following Hypertext links from one page to another. Once a spider discovers a link to your site it will follow that link and continue following links discovered in your navigation and footer until all the pages that make up your site are indexed. They then continue to follow links you may have that point to pages on other websites and the process starts again.

There are many hundreds of spiders working around the clock constantly mapping the internet and looking for new or changed pages to keep search engine indices up to date. You can check if your pages have been spidered by using the cache: advanced operator. For example type the following query into Google's search box:

cache:www.yourdomain.com/index.php

Substitute one of your own URL's in the above example to query your pages.

Cached versus normalised

This search will bring up the version of the page known to Google along with information about when it was last indexed. If the page does not reflect recent changes then the page has not been spidered since those changes went live. Although the page appears in the Google Cache it does not guarantee that the page has been indexed correctly only that it has been spidered and the code downloaded to Google's servers.

A cached version of a page is simply a direct copy of the page as discovered by the spider and does not indicate that the page was indexed, scored or categorized correctly. After a search engine spider downloads a page, proprietary algorithms normalise it so that each page conforms to a common format. HTML tags, images, stop words and punctuation are removed and the resulting document is stemmed to return the remaining words to their root.

The resulting text would make little sense to a human, yet it's this normalised document that search engines use to the determine context and relevancy of a page.

Catering for spiders and proprietary algorithms

To ensure that your pages are search engine friendly you need to cater for both spiders and these proprietary algorithms by ensuring that they can extract all textual elements from the page.

Web browsers such as Internet Explorer are very forgiving of HTML errors and have been coded in such a way as to display the page in the way that the author intended it to be seen. Not so with search engines, the overheads would be enormous. It is important that your pages underlying code is 100% error free. Just because a powerful browser with built in error correction (Quirky Mode) can render the page as intended does not mean that search engines can index it correctly.

Checking for standards compliant error free HTML

WYSIWYG editors that generate HTML code on the fly are notorious for inserting proprietary tags that form no part of the HTML language. If you use one of these programs you should be prepared to validate and edit the code manually. Furthermore, some Content Management Systems produce code and URL's that are so garbled pages cannot be indexed at all and live out their life as part of the 'invisible web'.

Thankfully there is a way you can check your code and receive guidance on how to remedy any embedded HTML errors. The World Wide Web Consortium provide an online tool which validates your code, lists the errors found and offers suggestions as how to fix each issue. Visit http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your code.

Rectifying coding issues and errors

If you are uncomfortable about correcting these issues yourself you should first contact your incumbent web developer and explain the problem. There should be no charge for this service, you are after all asking them to rectify their own errors! If that does not produce a suitable result Design Insite , or any reputable web developer, can undertake this work on your behalf, however, you will incur charges for this service.

Once the code is valid throughout the entire site you can move on to the next stage of the Search Engine Friendly site: Ensuring That URL's Are Search Engine Friendly.

Now Take Action

Take the first step towards great search engine positions and generating more sales, request your free search engine optimization quote or to talk us directly on 0141 416 0211 if your business is located in the UK or 69 347 5142 if your business is located in Spain.

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Design Insite,
Search Engine Optimization,
Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
Tel +44 0141 416 0211

Design Insite,
Search Engine Optimization,
Estepona, Spain.
Tel +34 693 475 142

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