One thing that seems to surface time and again is that of how to make a site’s structure and coding search engine friendly. Unfortunately, it seems that many site owners do not fully understand that their web designers and developers specialise in just that – web design and web development, and are generally not really specialists in search engines and how to cater to them.
The good news is that much of the basics required for making a site search engine friendly is not rocket science and, in many cases fairly quick and easy to implement. The bad news is that it can often be difficult knowing exactly what to look for.
So, in this article, I thought that I would address a few of the site structure issues that can negatively affect your site for SEO purposes.
The Basics of SEO
The basic building blocks of SEO are actually quite straightforward. For each priority page of your site, we need to write copy and meta tags that are key phrase rich for a small selection of specific phrases. By doing this, you are making that page relevant in the eyes of search engines for those few phrases and, this alone, can represent some good ranking improvements. The next basic step is a links building program that will generate key phrase rich inbound and one way links to your page to boost it even further in the rankings. Sounds easy? There are of course many tricks and strategies that help make this process more effective but, in essence, it is easy – just rather time consuming.
Site Structure
The problem though is that many sites suffer from structural and coding issues that prevent a search engine from seeing the pages of your site. And if a search engine can’t see your pages or your key phrase rich copy then, simply put, you don’t exist. And if you don’t exist, you cannot be ranked.
Most of these structural issues relate to objects that search engines can’t see, whereas the human eye can. Imagine Google as wearing particularly dark glasses which only allow it to pick up the most basic black text on a white background. Your human visitors may love pictures of deserted beaches with italic font swirling around in the left hand corner. It’s not that Google hates it per se; it’s just that those extra dark shades make it almost impossible for it to see.
Luckily at LeadGenerators we know only too well which parts of a website can be spotted by Google and which parts continue to remain a closed book. Of course, when carrying out an in-depth structural analysis there are many important factors and design issues that need to be considered, but for the sake of this article we will just look at four that seem to regularly occur in many sites that we analyse.
Flash
Flash may make your websites look flash, but Google doesn’t much care for that. You see the problem with using Flash is that the text on the attractive picture or interactive video you’ve planted on your page cannot be read by a search engine. This means that whilst your Flash presentation on beaches in the Bahamas may look great to human visitors, for search engines it is nothing more than a big empty box. The solution to this problem is ensuring that important parts of your website, such as the navigation menus, are not coded in Flash but rather in simple HTML text which can be read by Google et al. If you have Flash on any of your web pages then check that any important key phrases are written outside of the Flash files – again in simple HTML. You may also want to check that your website isn’t coded entirely in Flash, such as Monoface; which, despite being great fun, is completely invisible to search engines.
JavaScript
Don’t worry Flash programmers, Google doesn’t just not get Flash, it also doesn’t get JavaScript either. Drop down navigation menus, select boxes, etc are often written in JavaScript and search engines simply can’t read JavaScript. At LeadGenerators, we encounter many websites where the navigation menus are coded in JavaScript format and, when this occurs, we recommend ripping them out and replacing them with CSS; a script which is friendly to search engines. Changing your code from JavaScript to CSS may sound a little on the drastic side, but it is easy enough for your programmer or web designer to implement.
Image Maps
While image maps are great for customers, who love clicking on them to navigate around your site, search engines simply can’t read them. The problem with image maps is that they are images - and search engines cannot see images. So, while your customers can click on a country and go that that country page, a search engine sees it as a closed door. We see so many websites that suffer from this problem, so it was great to see that Tropical Locations had got it spot on. As you can see from the link, the image map has keyphrase rich links placed underneath the map in simple HTML format that can be picked up by search engines. This is an idea we’d strongly recommend your programmer copying if you have an image map placed anywhere on your website.
Frames
Remember those ugly framesets that were popular on websites around 5 years ago? Well some people actually still use them – albeit very few. If you’re lucky enough not to know what framesets are then please allow us to enlighten you. Framesets are a system where several HTML pages are placed together on the same screen. See example of frame site. They are most recognisable when part of the site, such as the header, is static and the body text scrolls up and down. Framesets are confusing to search engines, as they do not understand how all the different areas of the site relate to each other. As far as Google is concerned, any text in a frameset is either not seen or, if it is, does not attribute it to the parent site.
More?
These are just a small number of structural issues that are important to consider when determining whether or not your website is search engine friendly. There are plenty more but getting the above rectified on your site can certainly help to ensure that your site becomes more search engine friendly, your pages and your key phrase rich texts can be seen and, as a result, you start to earn better rankings in search engines.
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The Importance of Site Structure for SEO
