Thursday, January 21, 2010
Bing Website Architecture and SEO
Bing’s Recommendations for Website Design for easy indexing from their June 26, 2009, blog post by Webmaster Center team
The main components of SEO are, in Bing’s view
1. content
2. links
3. site architecture.
and ALL of these must work for search engines to index your website properly.
The search engine web crawler for Bing is MSNBot.They explain that the Bot interprets the HTML code it finds on a webpage and sends the content it discovers back to the search engine database so that it can be analyzed and indexed. They suggest setting your website up with the simplest structure so that any search engine and any browser can use it.
Bing’s suggestions with regard to website architecture are;
Use descriptive file and directory names
Avoid using underscores as word separators. Use hyphens instead.
Limit directory depth - …deep directory structure will mean the bot never gets to the deepest content. To alleviate this possibility, make your site’s directory structure shallow, no deeper than four child directories from the root.
Externalize on-page JavaScript and CSS code
…Removing JavaScript and CSS code from your pages into external files offers additional advantages beyond just shortening your webpage files. By being external to the content they modify, they can be used by multiple pages simultaneously. Externalizing this content also simplifies code maintenance issues.A few notes to consider. External file references are not supported in really old browser versions, such as Netscape Navigator 2.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x. But if the users of such old browsers are not your target audience, the benefits of externalizing this code will far outweigh that potential audience loss.
I also recommend storing your external code files separately from your HTML code, such as in /Scripts and /CSS directories. This helps keep website elements organized, and you can then easily use your robots.txt file to block bot access to all of your code files (after all, sometimes scripts handle business confidential data, so preventing the indexing of those files might be a wise idea!).
Use 301 redirects for moved pages
To find out more see………301 Redirects
Avoid JavaScript or meta refresh redirects
Implement custom 404 pages
…Instead of letting users go away thinking your site is broken, make an attempt to help them find what they want by showing a custom 404 page. Your page should look like the other page designs on your site, include an acknowledgment that the page the user was looking for doesn’t exist, and offer a link to your site’s home page and more importantly, access to either a site-wide search or an HTML-based sitemap page. At a minimum, make sure your site’s navigation tools are present, enabling the user to search for their content of interest before they leave.
Other crawler traps
Do Not use frames on your website.
Robots cannot “see”
1. forms
2. login pages
3. Pages that require either session IDs or cookies to be accessed as the Bots cannot generate session IDs or accept cookies so they are blocked from accessing content requiring such tracking measures.
