SiteProNews: Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Traffic (Part 1)

SiteProNews: 12/15/03 Feature Article

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Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Traffic (Part 1)
by Brendon Turner ŠCopyright 2003

Designing your site to maximize traffic from the search engines 
is not a difficult task but it does require you to think ahead 
and plan your SEO strategy carefully. If you have not yet built 
your web site and are still in the initial planning stages then 
you may have an easier time of it. If you already have an 
existing web site, then you may need to take the time to read up 
on these SEO strategies and make some changes to incorporate them 
into your web site.

I will discuss 13 ways in which you can improve on your existing 
web site or boost a brand new web site into the stratosphere of 
high rankings. These are not really SEO tricks but rather tried, 
tested and true methods that we know to work effectively. We all 
know that in reality there are no real SEO tricks. True success 
is achieved through hard work, research and implementation of a 
thorough and complete SEO strategy.

Without further ado here is a checklist of important items to 
consider and implement into your SEO strategy.

Using Javascript or Other Unspiderable Code

If you intend to use Javascript on your web page it is best to 
use it sparingly or not at all. Search engine spiders cannot 
read Javascript and it is possible that along with ignoring it 
when they come across it on your page, they may also get hung 
up on it if you are using a lot of it. If you really need to 
use Javascript you can safely use it by putting the code into 
a separate JS file and calling it with a single line of code 
which you place between your <head> and </head> tags within 
your web page. The code used to include your JS file looks like 
this:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" 
src="replace-with-JavaScript-file-name.js"></SCRIPT>

Using Style Guidelines Effectively

If you are using CSS style commands, do not include them within 
your actual web page source code. You don't want search engine 
spiders to have to wade through 100 lines of unreadable code 
before they reach your actual content. Instead, place your style 
guidelines into a separate CSS file and call them with a single 
line of code from within your <head> and </head> tags by using 
the following code:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="replace-with-style-file-name.css">

Primary Keyword Layout

Examine your web site from a source code point of view and 
ensure that your primary keywords or phrases will be spidered 
first. When search engine spiders read your page they read the 
source code just like we would read a book from left to right 
- top to bottom. We know that search engines place higher 
relevancy on keywords and phrases which appear closer to the 
top of a page so it stands to reason that if you've got a large 
table full of graphics appearing at the top of your source code 
before your primary keywords, then you can achieve higher 
rankings by adjusting your layout and placing a well written 
search engine optimized paragraph above that table full of 
graphics.

Spiderable Text Present on Each Page

Many times I have seen some very pretty web sites, but their 
chances of ranking high for any relevant keywords have been 
dashed by the use of only graphics and very little or no text on 
the pages. It is very important to your SEO strategy that you 
make sure that you've taken the time to write some quality 
textual content for your pages. Don't write nonsensical text 
filled with blatant sp@m. Instead, take a few extra minutes and 
write 4-5 quality paragraphs which clearly explain the theme of 
your site and the particular page your writing for. If you feel 
you haven't got the time, ambition or skills to write your own 
content don't stress over it. There are other options. You could 
visit the SEO Copywriting forum at FreeSEOAdvice.com to ask for 
help and get some valuable tips. Or you could hire a professional 
team to handle the project for you. Check out eTrafficJams.com 
for help with your SEO strategy and copywriting needs.

Proper Use of robots.txt File

On several occasions I have performed an analysis of a client's 
web site only to discover that they had inadvertently blocked 
spider access to their web site by incorrectly formatting 
their robots.txt file. It is critical that you know what you're 
doing when you use a robots.txt file. If you are unsure of the 
correct syntax when modifying or creating a robots.txt file, 
I recommend you not use a robots.txt file at all. This may sound 
counterproductive, but it's better to be safe than sorry.  
Accidentally blocking the spiders can result in a loss of all 
your rankings. It would almost be like starting over again to 
repair the damage. For help on correctly formatting your 
robots.txt file, visit robotstxt.org.

Dead Links and 404 Errors

If you are not checking for broken links on your web site, then 
you should start immediately and make this a part of your SEO 
strategy. You can never be 100% sure of your link integrity, 
especially when your site has 100, or more, pages. Aside from 
losing potential customers into a vortex of 404 errors, you risk 
more than that from a search engine perspective. When a search 
engine spider visits your web site and finds broken links, the 
impression left is that your site is not regularly maintained 
and updated. Not much is known about how the engines view this, 
but your crawl status may be assigned a low priority by visiting 
search engine spiders. In other words, the spiders may not visit 
your site as frequently as they visit sites with 100% link 
integrity. So make sure you download some link checking software 
and begin a regular schedule of verifying your link structure.

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Brendon Turner is a certified search engine optimization 
specialist and Senior SEO Consultant with eTrafficJams.com, a 
professional search engine optimization company that specializes 
in getting targeted, eager-to-buy traffic to your site! Brendon 
also maintains FreeSEOAdvice.com, a progressive free SEO forum 
advocating access to accurate and timely information related to 
the industry. Want some tips on how to improve your web site's 
optimization? Call 877-785-9977 or click to request a free 
search engine optimization analysis.
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