Designing Your Web Site to be Search Spider Friendly!

If most of what you give the spiders to see on your site, is lots of graphics and java script (which they are blind to), you have basically slammed the door in their face, and they will wonder off to find a site that does feed their picky but voracious appetite for clean HTML code.

Spiders love content (text) and do not read JavaScript at all, therefore a website that is packed with images with no ALT tags to assist the spiders, and heaps of JavaScript, which they cannot read, it may not be indexed successfully or at all. So, when designing your website you must incorporate structural website design principals that elicit search engine friendliness.

According to some surveys, more than 86% of all people arrive at websites through search engines. In 2006, PC World, arguably the most authoritative and widely-read computer and business magazine, reports that Google remains the site of choice for most surfers.

So, from a marketing perspective unless your site appears in the top 30 listings of the major search engines & directories, you will hardly get any worthwhile traffic. Therefore, Search Engine Positioning is vital to your marketing success on the web!

A top ranking in the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffic. If someone visits your site after searching for a product or service that you are selling, it means that he/she is interested in what you are selling and hence is a potential customer for you. Thus, search engines send pre-qualified customers to you.

A Balancing Act

People

Even though you must design your website with your visitors in mind first, it is crucial that you accord the search engines top level priority too, since the vast majority of these visitors will arrive via search engines. Practice good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but not at the expense of your visitors' experience -- it is a balancing act that must be accomplished with prudence.

Browsers

Also of significant importance is the fact that web browser standards are not yet fully harmonized. A web page that looks great in Internet Explorer might look atrocious in a Mozilla based browser like Firefox or Netscape. Additionally, with the proliferation of hand held devices for browsing the Internet, compliance with W3C standards is becoming more and more critical. A marketer must therefore be conversant with the intricacies of cross-browser design -- designing for one browser (IE) is no longer ideal, as the Google backed FireFox is eating up Microsoft's browser turf at an alarming rate.

Clean Code

Have you ever noticed that since the birth of FrontPage, everyone is suddenly a Webmaster? Anybody can "whip up" a web page in FrontPage without sufficient knowledge of HTML, but may not be able detect and correct the messy code that FrontPage generates underneath the page, some of which is proprietary to Microsoft. Consequently a website that looks superb in Microsoft Internet Explorer may look and load dreadfully in Opera and/or some other browser, denying you visitor traffic.

Never use a Word Processor to design your website. Word Processing software generates tremendous amounts of code that is not search engine friendly. If you cannot hand-code using a text editor then it is necessary that you use authentic and industry standard web design software that incorporate the most up to date design principles. Macromedia's Dreamweaver gets our partisan nod.

Good Technique

A first-rate design strategy should include the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and valid XHTML, the most current in the HTML generation of standards. Websites designed in strict W3C standards tend to be lighter, faster and cross-browser compatible. This is not to insinuate that table based design is going anywhere anytime soon, for it is my humble disputation that if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, 95% percent of websites would go out of business, furthermore the lack of inter-browser synchronization just worsens things.

Finally...

You can sell virtually anything on the Internet, but in order to succeed you must bring "targeted traffic" to your website....people who are ready to buy your products and services, the vast majority of who will arrive at your website through search engines. If your website is not designed suitably, Google and other search engines will disrespect your website. Respect brings in traffic which translates into the all important $$.

Remember, since search engine bots are your most important visitors, you must seduce, "open your doors" and accommodate them in order to gain any measurable success in your Internet Marketing endeavor.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization principles when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily classified and indexed by search engines. But then again it helps to submit your site to the Search Engines to speed up that process and there are some other things that you need to do to raise your standings in the Search Engines once you get there.so feel free to call us about Site Marketing.it is important to your success! 316-686-2284

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