Search Engine Friendly Websites

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How do I Optimise my Website? Optimise your website for visitors and you will be optimising it for search engines. But you should also make sure that the website is technically correct so that you are making your website search engine friendly - poor coding and structure can cause both search engine and browser problems.

Avoid Unnecessary or Bulky Code, Frames and Flash

If you want a well indexed website avoid Flash unless you have a full html equivalent, but even then I would still strongly suggest you do not bother with Flash. Most multinational companies are moving towards flat easy to navigate non-flash websites. Even more importantly do not use frame based websites, the construction of these websites do not allow for search engines to easily index the content of your website's pages and so a website of this type will only hold you back.

Use CSS style sheets

This makes the code much tidier and the files can be read more quickly plus from your point of view a simple change to the look of the site is easy as you only need to change parameters in one place rather than on every page.

Good Clean Coding

Make sure you check your coding and style sheets with W3C.

Alt Text

Include alt and title text for every image using the keywords for that page.

Link Text

Make sure that every link uses a proper keyword rich description that clearly describes where the link is going. The keywords for the link text should be the keywords of the page the link points to. Never use click heres as search engines look at the link and at the words describing the link to see whether they tie up with the content of the destination page,

Descriptive URLs

Make the page URLs descriptive and keyword rich rather than the shorthand that used to be used. For example "/contactus.htm" is better written as "/contact-seo4all.htm". Search engines will interpret the hyphen as meaning that there is a space between the words and instead of using the word "us" you have an opportunity to use your business name.

Web Page Layout

Web Page Layout?
Search engines read your website from top left down to bottom right, it therefore stands to reason that it is sensible to make sure that your most valuable and relevant content is towards the top of the page. If you look at the image to the right you will see a typical web page layout. If you have a website built using tables you may well find that the order in which the website is read is Header-Top Menu-Side Menu-Body. If this is the case then your important body content is being read last. Ideally you want the search engines to see your body content first so by writing your code carefully using divs you can ensure that the body text is read before say, the top and side menus leading to better indexing of your website.