Search Engine Friendly Web Development
3 Simple Tests to determine if your web pages are Search Engine Friendly.
Constructing pages in a way that makes them naturally appealing to search engines is a major component in attracting traffic to your site. Some engines, (like Microsoft's MSN Search Engine,) determine ranking largely based on page content and structure alone.
The following are three basic tests that you can perform to determine if your web pages are search engine friendly.
If your pages do not pass each of the three tests below, you have very little chance of attracting significant amounts of traffic via search engines. It should be noted that when we build pages we do a great deal more than address these three issues, (we look for about 30 points when working on clients sites), but these are the basics – get these wrong and you’ve got no hope.
Test 1: Are your URL's Search Engine Friendly?
The addresses used on the different pages of your website (called the URL) need to be easily readable by a human. For example, if you sell furniture online web pages should have an addresses something like:
Search Engine Friendly Web Page Addresses
www.furniture.com/lounges/jason-lazy-boy.htm
Here you can see the words ‘lounges’ and ‘Jason Lazy Boy’ are both easily identifiable - and it's clear to anyone what the page is about (even if you didn't visit the web-site itself).
Compare this with the following which shows how many sites display their web page addresses for different pages within their site
Unfriendly (horrible) Web Page Addresses
www.furniture.com/index.php?id=445021&type=J72ik
See how this address is obviously computer jibberish, and not easily understood by a human. If a person can’t understand it, often the search engines will struggle also.
Specifically, it is the characters that appear after the “?” in the address that can cause problems.
Test 2: Do my pages make use of keywords appropriately?
This one is pretty obvious. If you wish to appear in search engines for a given key phrase e.g. “child care Blackburn” then that phrase must be present in the web page you wish to rank for.
The part that’s maybe not obvious is that the key phrase should appear in the following locations:
- The title of your page – here’s an example showing “Child Care Blackburn” being included in the title tag.
- The content of your page (as words) – if your page doesn’t talk about a phrase in the text of the page, you won’t be ranked. Also, ensure that the key words are real text, not an image with a word in it. If you can’t copy and paste the text into a letter, it’s not text.
For those HTML junkies out there, including your phrases in headings (and make sure you use H1 tags) and bolding them in general content help tell the engines that a specific page relates to a given key phrase. Also, phrases need to be included in the HTML description and keyword meta tags (although keywords is less relevant than it used to be).
Test 3 – Is my content ‘accessible’ to the search engine robots?
This is where many websites unknowing fail. What you need to understand is that search engines see your pages very differently to humans. People see pretty pictures and nicely laid out pages (what we call the ‘rendered’ view) of the page.
In comparison search engines only see the raw, underlying text of a page. To see what a search engine sees, you must ‘view the source’ of the page. In Internet Explorer, you do this by selecting the “Edit” menu and then selecting the “Source” option.
What you’ll then see is the source of the web page, which looks something like :
This is the source code of the Alliance Software home page. The thing to note (and this is an example of good source code) is that there is a high proportion of words that humans can read (these have been highlighted in yellow).
Now, compare this with the source code for another site I visit regularly (which shall remain nameless).
You can see how in this page, the search engine robots are only given a little bit of text (marked in yellow). Now consider the section in red. It is completely incomprehensible. That section is an example of Javascript that has been embedded in the page. This site, like many others we are called to work on, has five A4 pages of Javascript code before you reach any content a human will understand.
This site has a major handicap when it comes to getting ranking. Our experience has been that having this much ‘junk’ in the page will cause the search engine robots to give up and not index the site. The good news is, that without changing the look of the site at all, it’s possible to build it in such a way that all this unfriendly content is hidden away and you only give the search engines what they need, which is good content.
Again, for the HTML junkies out there, using CSS to manage the page layout on your site rather than the old fashion HTML table approach is a key step to ensuring you give the engines lots of content.
Search Engine Friendly Web Pages Summary
If you ensure your pages have Search Engine Friendly URL’s, make prominent use of key phrases and expose their content to the search engines nicely (e.g. the source code isn’t loaded up with junk) then you’ll put yourself in front of 80% of the other websites that are out there.
Are you having trouble getting your web developers to build you Search Engine Friendly pages? Are you not ranking for key phrases important to your business? We can rework your site to be search engine friendly. Contact us for a no obligation assessment today.