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

Navigation Menus

    What are navigation menus anyway? Think of them as arrows that let you know how to get around a theme park or a zoo. These helpful little signs indicate where the restrooms are, or where the entrance and exits can be found. Likewise, in a website, your navigation menu lets your user go from the home page to another page and from that other page back to the home page if he desires to do so.

    How can you make your navigation menu search engine friendly? Simply put, if you have a site of ten pages or whatever, be sure that every page will contain a link that goes back to the home page. If you have several subdirectories, be sure you also include their names on your navigation menus. This helps visitors go through your site easily, as well as provide good spider food for web crawlers to index your site, especially if your navigation menu is located at the top of your page.

    Whenever a visitor reads content on one page of your site, he should be able to know where he is, and not lost after he has done a multitude of clicks.

Drop Down Menus

    Drop down menus are often used on navigation bars to show how a main topic branches out into subtopics. They are called such because when main topic link is clicked, a menu of subtopics appears, which you can click depending on what page you want to read about.
As said earlier in this e-book, search engine technologies are constantly improving, so what used to be a problem with indexing using drop down menus can now be possible in Google, for example.

    However, if you want to avoid any additional troubles when trying to do SEO on your site, links are better options than having to put up drop down menus.

    Here is another good tip: remember how CSS help webmasters a lot in implementing SEO? There are now CSS templates that have inclusions for drop down menus. You can learn more about how you can make use of this in your site, should you wish to present your links through the use of drop down menus.