Having a Website

    In Chapter 2: Having a Website, you will be given a checklist of what makes website a good one. Learn about the parameters that search engines measure to determine if optimization can be effective for that site. Perhaps you will need to make a few changes with your own site to jive with some of the easy-to-follow suggestions in this section.

  • Having a Website
    • Website SEO Quality Parameters
      • Search friendly Domain names
      • Directory Structure, File Naming & Page File Extensions
      • Navigation Menus & Drop Down Menus
      • Robots Exclusion Protocol (Robots.txt File)
      • Error Trapping
      • Google Site Maps & Image Maps
      • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
      • Server Side Includes (SSI)
      • Graphic-Heavy Pages, Flash & Intro / Splash Pages
    • Search Engine Rules
    • SEO Terminology
    • Dynamic Pages
    • Doorway Pages / Cloaking
    • Frame based sites and Tables
    • Is your website SEO Friendly

Frame Based Sites

    Frames used to be a smart method of presenting websites because you are given the ability to show lots of content at once. A different section of a site can be designated by means of a frame, and the user can switch to other pages without losing site of what is contained in some frames.

    Frames within web pages are done my creating individual pages for each frame. So if a site has three frames, one for the advertisement, one for the navigation menu, and one for the main content, these were actually created in three different HTML files.

    According to internet experts, frames are now an outdated way of presenting websites, and not to mention very unfriendly for SEO. Not only that, many SEO experts do not recommend the use of frames simply because there is bigger room for error. If a frame in your site fails to load, then that spells trouble for your web visitor.

    When a site has frames, you can not easily bookmark the content of that page, not unless you want to bookmark each frame. You will have to copy the text and paste it elsewhere, such as in your Word program or notepad.

    Generally, frames are unhealthy for SEO. There are newer methods by which you can present content in your site more effectively. As said before, cascade style sheets are a great way to go. CSS can save you a lot of time an d headache.

    Remember, frame based sites are not a good idea if you want to get rood rankings on search engine results.

Search Engines and Tables

    Tables are ways by which you can format the content of your site. One way to explain this is that all the content of your site, as they appear on a specific page, can be imagined to be placed in a table, with invisible delineations between cells, columns, and rows.

    The topmost row of the table is the header, in which website visitors see the title of your website, or the name of the page. You can imagine the next row below that to be your navigation menu, with links that point to specific areas of your site to make it easier for visitors to browse through.

    SEO experts advise that you make use of the proper structures of tables when you put together the elements of your webpage. You should design the tables in such a way as to lead the spiders to go through every part of your page, especially the content which is rich in keywords.

    Typically, sites with keywords at the top of the pages are indexed well by bots and spiders. It is said that search engines are smart enough to assume that the most important content of a site is found at the top, and less relevant stuff goes to the bottom of the page.

    Having this in mind, you can imagine the bots and spiders to start crawling through your site, row by row. It goes to the first row first, where you should have placed relevant titles, meta tags, and the like. It goes to the second, which is your navigation menu, and so on.

    You can learn more about how to create tables using HTML through the many tutorials available from http://www.w3schools.com.