One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is to ensure that your website pages are as accessible as possible to the search engines. It's not just the home page of a website that can be indexed, but internal pages within the site structure. The internal pages of a site often contain important content, such as products, services or general information, and therefore can only be optimized for related terms. As a result, the easy access to these pages is of vital importance.
There are many things to do and what not to do that come to make all your pages can be found by search engines. However, it is important to establish first how search engines find and index web pages.
Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders") to find content on the site for inclusion in the index. A robot is a computer program that can follow the hyperlinks on a web page, known as "drag". When a robot finds a document that includes the content within the search engine index, then follow the following links can be found and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the navigation structure of a website is important to get pages indexed as much as possible.
When considering the navigational structure of your site, the hierarchy of content must be considered. Search engines judge what they feel the most important pages of a site when considering the position classifications and a page in the site's structure can influence this. The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site - which is the parent document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, the search engine robots can usually get to the pages within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, the most important pages should be a click, the next two clicks away important and so on.
The next thing to consider is how to link pages. Generic search engine robots can only follow HTML href links, ie links Flash, JavaScript links, menus and buttons to send everyone can have access to the robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also generally ignored, so be aware of this if you have a dynamically generated website.
The best links to use from SEO point of view are generic HTML text links, and that not only can be followed by robots, but the text in the anchor can also be used to describe the destination page - an optimization plus one point. Links to images are also acceptable, but the ability to describe the destination page is smaller, as the alt attribute is not given much weight ranking as the anchor text.
The most natural way to organize content on a website is to classify. Analyze your products, services or information on related and structure so that the most important aspects are linked to the main page. If you have a lot of information for each category, new content will have to cut down even more. This could involve having articles on a similar topic, the different types of product for sale, or content that can be divided geographically. Optimizing classification is natural - the more you analyze your information, the more content you can provide more niches and key phrases must be objective.
If you are still concerned that your important pages can not be indexed, then you can consider adding a map of your website. A map can be best described as an index page - which is a list of links to all pages of a content site on a page. If you link to a map of your home page then gives you easy access to all the robots from the pages of your site. Just remember - robots usually can not go more than 100 links on a page, so if your site is larger than this you may want to consider spreading your map through several pages.
There are many considerations to make to optimize your site for search engines, and make their pages accessible to the robots of search engines should be the first step of the optimization process. Following these tips will help you make your entire site accessible and help in obtaining multiple classifications and the extra traffic.
December 09, 2009, 07:21:41 AM