Marknet Group Blog

How do you know if Google, Yahoo or MSN/Live will like your site? Or are you concerned that Google, Yahoo or MSN/Live will like your site? The information in this article will answer your question by describing how to accomplish that.

In last month’s Internet Marketing article, I explained search engine optimization (SEO) and outlined the building blocks of search engine success. To recap, the building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people will use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

This article will focus on the first building block - creating a search engine friendly website. There are many facets to creating a search engine friendly website. You may want an appealing or an attractive website, but you also want a website that is search engine friendly. You can accomplish this balancing act by understanding how search engines visit your website.

Search engines visit your website using a program called a spider to download the website pages, read the content and hyperlinks, and store this information in their database. Once it is in their database your site is “indexed”. You will want your website to be indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. These are the big three search engines.

Two things must be accomplished by the spider for your site to be search engine friendly.

First, it must be able to read the content on your website. The website content tells the search engine what your website is about. When someone types “Honda Cars, Brewster NY” in Google, Google can tell that www.brewsterhonda.com sells Honda’s in Brewster.

Second, it must find every page on your website. To do that, it must find links to the other pages from within your website. For example, if on your home page you have a link to About Us, the spider can find the About Us page from the Home Page.

Basically, the easier it is for the spider to crawl through your site and gather your content the less risk you have of being ignored by the search engines.

The main elements of search engine friendly design are:

1. Use a Site Map - A site map is a web page on your website that has links to every page within your site. A site map ensures that every page on your website is one click away from the home page. You can view an example site map at http://www.marknetgroup.com/sitemap.php.

2. Avoid Frames if Possible - A site that is full of frames makes it more difficult for the spider to crawl your website. Therefore, the spider will not capture all of the pages on your website. There are ways to make frames more search engine friendly but we recommend you avoid them. Here is a sample frames site http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/.

3. Avoid Flash Only Sites - The search engine spider cannot read the content that is within Flash. We can recommend ways to make it work but most designers won’t know the techniques. I should note, you CAN use Flash on your site but you should adhere to the following:

a. If your home page is one big Flash file the spider won’t crawl to the other pages and won’t read your content. Use Flash to enhance specific areas of your webpage but not the entire webpage.

b. Use the noembed tag. Yes, it is a technical term that you can pass on to your web developer if they created a Flash only site.

4. Avoid a Graphic Only Home Page - The spider can only read text. Therefore, if you have a home page that is one large graphic the spider cannot gather the content.

5. Keyword Placement is Important - Next month I will show you how to find your keywords and how to place them on your website.

Be sure to read next month’s issue, my article will define one of the most important aspects of search engine success.