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

Is Your Website SEO Friendly

    After this lengthy discussion on all the parameters and elements that you as the webmaster can alter in order for your site to rank as high as possible, you need to ask yourself: is your website SEO friendly?

    A way for you to answer that is use the earlier portions of this chapter as a checklist. Find out what methods you have used already, or what website elements you may need to include. If there are elements of web design that seem new to you, you can consult SEO forums to find out how you can implement this. Better yet, if you have the resources, talk things out with your SEO Company, to know what factors you and your site can improve on.

    What is the first thing you have to know when you want a site that is SEO friendly? Be visible to your search engine. As said before, you can hasten the process of bot and spider indexing by submitting your site to directories or to Google, MSN, or Yahoo, among many others.

    If that doesn’t work, be sure your link appears on many other sites, so that if bots come across your friend-sites, they are sure to end up in your home page eventually.

    Another big thing to consider: content is king. You can learn more about the significance of keywords and many other elements in creating content for your site. It isn’t enough that you have fancy text effects or cool Flash animations. A site with no content offers no food for spiders to chew on.

    You should be able to do enough keyword research to get your imaginative juices flowing. Check out chapter 9 to learn more about tools that you can use for analysis and keyword research as better options for SEO.

    Remember to make your site spider-friendly, or in SEO terms, a “crawlable” place. Recall the elements that hinder spiders and bots from indexing your page. Make use of Meta tags and descriptions the best way you can.

    If you have several pages in your site, be sure your navigation menu has got them all covered. Don’t forget to put in the robots.txt file so redundancy can be avoided.

    Keep in mind how CSS and SSI can save you a lot of effort and time in managing dozens to hundreds of pages on your website. You will have even more options for designs and less time to worry about how to implement them, thanks to these tools. You can concentrate on other factors such as content and link building instead.

    Also, don’t hesitate to do more research on your own. The World Wide Web, as we all say, is infinitely vast. The possibilities are endless. SEO is a huge field, and you need to keep yourself constantly updated.

    Now that you have an idea of how to make your website SEO friendly and more, you might want to check out additional help from these links:

http://www.seochat.com

http://www.issuemarketing.com

http://www.webpronews.com

http://www.searchengineguide.com