Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Traffic (Part 2)
by Brendon Turner ©Copyright 2003

(Part 1 of this article was published on Monday, Dec. 15/03
in SiteProNews and can be found in the SPN archives.
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2003/dec/15.html)

Using Images For Primary Navigation Links

Many webmasters like to use fancy looking navigation links but, 
in doing so, they fail to establish a theme for their sites. For 
instance, using a graphical link back to your home page does not 
tell the search engine spiders what that link is about unless 
the spider actually visits that page. If you use optimized ALT 
text on that graphical home page link, then that would be a step 
in the right direction. But to maximize the effect and clearly 
define the theme of your web site, you need to use a text link 
that has your primary keyword or phrase within the link text. 
This is called Link Reputation.

Home, Site Map and Contact Page Links

The Home, Site Map and Contact pages are your site's primary 
pages and should be your SEO strategy top priority. It is 
essential that these pages be spidered and exposed to your site 
visitors. To ensure that they are spidered, place links to them 
near the top of your source code on every page of your web site. 
Your home page is, of course, the main entrance to your web site 
so you want that to be the focal point in the search engines. 
Your site map page should (if properly optimized) have links to 
all of your sub pages and use primary keywords belonging to each 
sub page within the link text pointing to those sub pages. Your 
contact page is just as important because it's used by visitors
who have questions or who wish to order products and services.

Redirected Pages

When a web page has outlived its usefulness, webmasters will, on
occasion, redirect visitors hitting that page to another page. 
Search engine spiders, however, take a dim view of page 
redirects. If you change the content of your site and find that 
you have no further use for a page, do not place a redirect on 
that page. Instead, remove the outdated content and replace it 
with something relevant. Include a text link to your home page 
or to a new replacement page. When you remove a page or place a 
redirect on an outdated page, you're cheating yourself out of 
better rankings and search engine traffic. Moreover, using page 
redirects can result in the removal of your site listing in 
search engine databases with a consequent loss of revenue. 

Excessively Small Type Font Sizes

Text in a font smaller than font size 2 is normally reserved for 
copyright information and the legal jargon often seen at the 
bottom of web pages. Use font size 2, or greater, for the 
majority of text on your page. Font size is a major factor in 
SEO strategy because the font size used defines the relevancy a 
search engine spider assigns to the content it finds on your 
page. An example of this would be the text within heading tags 
(H1 through to H6). Text surrounded with H1 tags has a higher 
relevancy placed on it than text surrounded with H6 tags. Visit 
the World Wide Web Consortium website (http://www.W3.org) for a 
better understanding of how on-page text is viewed by search 
engine spiders with regard to importance and relevancy. Search 
engine spiders tend to follow the W3 HTML standard.

Hidden Text, Door Way Pages and Other Tricks

Nowadays search engines are pretty smart and trying to trick
them is not a wise course of action. Take some time to stop 
and examine your approach before proceeding with your SEO 
strategy. The rule of thumb is that if it looks like spam or 
could be perceived as spam by the search engines, then it 
probably is spam. The last thing you need is for a competitor 
to report unethical SEO tactics to the search engines. Such 
tactics could result in a loss of existing site listings as 
well as a ban on future submissions. So, to ensure the longevity 
of your online business, stay away from any technique that looks 
unethical.

Using HTML Frames

In short, don't. Frames are not very search engine friendly 
because search engines cannot read a framed source document that 
tells your browser to load more than one page in your browser 
window at the same time. Thus, achieving a high PageRank 
(http://www.google.com/technology/) on your home page is 
difficult. Frames also make it hard for search engine spiders 
to find all of your sub pages.

Non-Spider-Friendly URL's

If the URL's for your web site contain characters such as &, $, 
=, %, etc., that is they are dynamic in nature, then search 
engine spiders may not be able to read them. And, if they can't 
be read, then the search engine spiders won't be able to follow 
them to index your pages. However, there are solutions available 
to fix this problem. For example, webmasters who have sites 
hosted on servers with Unix operating systems can use Apache 
mod_rewrite to rewrite URL's that contain a session ID, or other 
nasty characters, into search engine spider friendly URL's. See 
this page
(http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/spider_dynamic_site.html)
for more information about how you can invite search engine 
spiders into your dynamic web site.

SEO, of course, is not just limited to the 13 areas covered in 
this article, but if you apply the SEO strategies outlined in 
these 13 areas to your web site, you will find that your site 
rankings and traffic improve dramatically.

================================================================
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. 
(http://www.etrafficjams.com/freeanalysis.htm)
================================================================

Copyright © 2003 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.