Search Engine Friendly Websites

There is no point in having a website unless there visitors coming to it. A major source of visitors to most sites on the internet is from search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and so on. Hence, ensuring your website is search engine friendly will help the search engines scan & categorise your website correctly.

Search engines use automated programs sometimes referred to as crawlers, spiders or robots to scan websites to include in their search result pages. They do this by following links from one page to another, reading the content of the webpage, and recording it in their own database.

To give your website the best change of being included in the search engine results, there are a number of things that can be done to make a page search engine friendly:

• Avoid frames at all costs. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
• Do not present information in a Flash movie or image without some text alternative. Search engine robots can only read text from the html of your website so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.
• Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page. Meta tags provide some background information about the page to the search engines. Although the use of some meta tags is now less important it is still good practice to include them to make it easier for the search engine robots as they index your site.
• Stop using old html tags like to style your page. Technology has moved on, and it is now best practice to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.
• Ensure your website is using valid HTML & CSS. There are checking tools at W3C to do this and will also give your website the best chance of displaying correctly in various browsers.