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08/02/2012 4:51 pm

SEO Web Design

Search Engine Optimisation Process Part 4: SEO Friendly Structure

Search Engines need to be able to access your site to pull the information required for the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).  Here is a brief explanation of the process and benefits required to make your site accessible to the Search Engines.

Search Engine Friendly Web Design

Search Engines need to access the content on your web site. They do this using spiders,  robots, crawlers searching for information to display on their SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). A site needs to be set up in a friendly manner for the robots, with the key being accessibility to direct html links. Once the search engines find this information they store it. Web pages will not be stored (indexed) if there is no direct link to the page on your site.

Designing a Search Engine Accessible Structure

Create a Clear Hierarchy

Have your home page or front page at the top. Make sure each important page has at least one html link from each page.

Easy to read web address (URL)

In dynamic webpages the URL can be filled with ugly letters and numbers that don’t make much sense to a visitor. By changing these into meaningful words the visitor to the site and the search engine can understand them. Speak to your Web Designer/Developer to see if they can help or if you use WordPress the shorter URL’s are Permalinks and in Drupal they are called Clean URL’s.

  • Not good – http://www.briancee.com?134567ulnlknn–yuyfuy—
  • Good – http://www.briancee.com/search-engine-friendly

When the address (URL) is written clearly it helps the search engine to identify the folder structure of the site, (in Google this also helps with the Google Sitelinks feature). Matt Cutts of Google recommends not using more than 5 words if possible for the most effective URL.

Using Short URLs are also helpful for your Search Engine Results, Shorter URL’s have more chance of being clicked. For more on URL’s check out Rand Fishkin’s 11 Best Practises for URL’s

HTML Search Engine and Accessibility Basics

There are many web coding languages inside web sites, they help to bring and show content.  These languages all help to structure websites and your user experience, they include Flash, Javascript, VB, PHP, ASP, HTML, and more.  The most important language as stated earlier is HTML (hypertext markup language), this is the code used by the search engines.  Search Engines do not like it when HTML is not utilised fully or used with another language (or is in part replaced by another language) in a manner that makes it difficult to access.

Basic HTML techniques available to improve SEO

Please be aware apart from the Doctype declaration all the other tags and attributes are written in lower case, they will not work in upper case.  If you are unsure about HTML check out w3schools online free tutorials and a vast arrary of information about web coding languages.

  • DOCTYPE – The doctype declaration should be the very first thing in an HTML document, before the tag.  The doctype declaration is not an HTML tag; it is an instruction to the web browser about what version of the markup language the page is written in.The doctype declaration refers to a Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD specifies the rules for the markup language, so that the browsers can render the content correctly.  More on Doctypes
    • <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  • Language attribute – Possible to specify language setting .  A default language allows a screen reader to tell the visitor which language the page is in without even seeing the content. It is also required by W3C standards.
    • xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
  • http-equiv meta tag – this is used in conjunction with the DOCTYPE, it helps the browser display your page correctly.
    • <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
  • Keyword attribute – the keyword metatag was once very important but due to abuse from spammers it is now fairly unimportant.  Older search engines still use the keyword tag.  Google said they don’t recognise the keyword tag.  I believe it is still worth adding a few relevant keywords.
    • <meta name="keywords" content="Search Engine Friendly structure,search engine, SEO Structure"/>
  • Description attribute – this is very important, as the description is the text shown on a search engine results page and is what the user will see.  (This is up to the search engine sometimes they will show text from the page if they feel it is more relevant).
    • <meta name="description" content="Search Engine Friendly structure,offering information relating to basic SEO techniques and HTML"/>
  • Canonical attribute – shows the search engine which is the main required page if there are duplicates.
    •  <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.briancee.com/' />
  • Index or NoIndex attribute – it is possible to tell the robot not to index a certain page, or to index remove “no” from “noindex”.
    • <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>
  • Nofollow attribute- can also add to anchor tags to stop search engines accessing content you don’t want them to see or stop them leaving the website by following an external link. VERY IMPORTANT you want to push the robots to your most important pages, add this to outbound links or links of little or no importance.  This attribute is used alot on forums!
    • <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"/>
    • <a href="http://www.briancee.com" rel="nofollow" />
  • Title tag – This is seen to be the most important indicator to the content on your page and how the search engine will judge your page.  By using optimised keywords here you also show the user the content of the page as the title is displayed at the top of the browser.
    • <title>SEO Friendly Structure Brian Cee’s Blog</title>
  • Header Tags – These tags also put across the message of your webpage and differ in importance the <h1> tag is the most important with <h6> being the lowest.
    • <h1>Brian Cee’s Blog</h1>
  • Strong and Emphasis tags – These tags highlight words and gain more importance to the search .
    • <strong>Brian Cee’s Blog</strong>
    • <em>Structured HTML</em>
  • Alt tag – The alt tag tells visitors what an image is if it cannot be displayed or viewed. Plus it reinforces what the image is to the search engine.
    • <img src=”Twitter.jpg” alt=”Twitter Image”/>
  • Hide Javascript – Where possible place Javascript at the bottom of the page, the pages render faster.  Also use CDATA tags and then comment out the tags.
    • <script type='text/javascript'>
/* 
var thickbox = {
        next: "Next >",
        prev: "< Prev",
        image: "Image",
        of: "of",
        close: "Close"
};
try{convert(thickboxncatch(e){};
/* ]]> */

Add an XML Sitemap

Adding a Sitemap lets the search engines know what pages you would like listed (indexed) and how often you would like the search engines to visit.  You can have a site map for different types of media e.g. a Video Sitemap.

You must have a Sitemap installed on your site.

There are plenty of places to create Sitemaps if you have a Google account you can log in to the Google Webmasters section and create one. The Content Management Systems have Plugins for XML site Maps, for WordPress and for Drupal

The Robots.txt file

You must have a Robot.txt file installed on your site.

The purpose of the robots.txt file is to tell the robots where to go on your site.  This extract is straight from Google:

A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages. (All respectable robots will respect the directives in a robots.txt file, although some may interpret them differently. However, a robots.txt is not enforceable, and some spammers and other troublemakers may ignore it. For this reason, we recommend password protecting confidential information.)

Robots.txt files are very simple once you see an example to create yourself, but if want one from Google or on WordPress and Drupal.

These are by no means all the techniques available to help improve the quality of your website but related to search engine accessibility these should help.  In the next section we cover  keyword analysis research.

The Search Engine Optimisation Process Help List – 6 Key Areas

The links below need to be followed in a series (one after the other).  All set to move onto Part 5? Get ready you will be begin link building which is extremely important and can drive more traffic to your site and increase conversions.  If you need any help contact me on Twitter @briancee1.  Enjoy!

These links will appear at the bottom of each page in the series

  1. SEO Tools – Check your Site
  2. Keyword Analysis Research
  3. Web Content Writing – Web Copy
  4. SEO Web Design – Search Engine and User Friendly Structure
  5. Link Building – The Natural Way
  6. SEO Service – Revisiting, Fixing and Optimising your site.

I am on Twitter @briancee1 if you would like to follow me and you can also subscribe to my blog updates or the Newsletter at the top in the right hand bar.  Thanks for reading and I hoped this helped.

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