SiteProNews: Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Traffic

SiteProNews: June 27, 2005 Feature Article

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Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Traffic 
By Brendon Turner (c) 2005

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 SEO tricks but rather tried,
tested, ethical 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">

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 you're writing for.

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.

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 w3.org (http://www.w3.org/) website 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 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 URLs 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 URLs that contain a session ID, or other
nasty characters, into search engine spider friendly URL's.

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 (http://www.profitgazette.com/) with 8 years
experience as a Senior SEO Consultant. Brendon also maintains
ProfitGazette.com (http://www.profitgazette.com/), a progressive
weekly edition of | real-world online marketing business tactics
that work (http://www.profitgazette.com/)!
================================================================

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