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

Google Sitemaps

    What are site maps anyway? Is there a need to be technical in implementing this on your website? Site maps are very helpful for webmasters who want to be sure that their sites and web pages can be indexed by MSN, Yahoo, and Google bots, among many others.

    Google Sitemaps are created using XML, and are efficient ways to present your site to be available for indexing by the crawlers or spiders. As said by many, this makes it faster and more effective towards the goal of SEO.

    It is a good thing that XML site maps can be created without having to write to code yourself. Google, for example, presents a list of third party sites that offer site map generation services.
Here are some examples of websites that can provide you with your site maps:

http://www.autositemap.com

http://www.sitemapspal.com

http://www.nuah.com

    A site map generator, like the ones mentioned above, usually requires you to type in your domain, and they will do the rest. The XML file will be sent to you, and you can upload that on your site.

Image Maps

    Image maps are large graphic files that are divided into sections, each section linking to a specific portion of a website. An example will be a large picture of the map of Asia, with specific countries tagged with links to pages describing the details of that country. Clicking on a country will direct you to the page that provides info for it. Image maps are often used for aesthetic purposes, and sometimes for easier navigation.

    However, SEO experts explain that image maps are not entirely helpful for SEO efforts. But there are ways by which image maps can be integrated, and the site is still SEO friendly.

    You can place links or text somewhere at the bottom of your page for navigation purposes. In a way you are reiterating the directions in which your image map points to. This is a good safety measure in case your image map doesn’t load properly. Also, bots and spiders can still index your site through your navigation menu.