Search Engine Friendly Sites
One of the single most important things to getting good rankings in search engines is your site’s architecture. By this I mean the way your site is designed and put together. I have touched on this topic a little bit in the past, but I wanted to really cover it in more depth so hopefully this article will help you to design sites that are very search engine friendly. If you are building small 2-3 page sites some of this may not apply to you, but if you are putting together a large site with many pages it should, hopefully, give you some insight into how to put it together.
DON’T GO TOO DEEP
I have been told by several people that are very wise and well versed in search engines that having a site that is too many pages deep can eventually hurt you rankings. What I mean by this is that you don’t want the spider to have to crawl 10 pages into your site to index pages. Some huge sites may be forced to have this many pages, but a good design should be able to work around this. The rule of thumb should be 2-4 clicks with the optimal amount being no more than 3 clicks to get from any page on your site to any other page on your site. So if you have a link site with a warning page then a main menu page then the actual categories pages it will take 2 clicks to get from the warning page to the content pages which is perfect. If you have the same site designed so that you have a warning page, main menu page then FPA, then sub-category page and then a content page it now takes 4+ clicks to get to the content and that can hurt you in the rankings. The search engines tend to give the highest priority to the first page it indexes and each page away from that first page gets less and less overall relevance.
If you look at some of the largest link sites in the adult world you can get to any page on them within 1-2 clicks. This is perfect because it forms a nice little “web” for the search engine spiders to crawl through and it makes sure that they see and index every page.
SPIDERS CAN’T CLICK
Search engines spiders can’t click. They can read and follow links, but they can’t click. This means that flash, active X and JavaScript applets can often throw the spider off. You can make a site that looks amazing, has the coolest flash based menus anyone has ever seen and explodes with sound, flash video and amazing graphics and it may as well be dead to the search engines. The search engine spider will see the first page, read any and all text you have on it and then it will not be able to activate or follow your flash buttons/menu so it won’t be indexing anything else on your site. If you decided to use flash or anything like it, make sure that you also include a text version of the menu on the same page so that the search engine spiders can follow it.
NETWORK IT
Speaking of a text menu, it is a good idea to have a text menu on every page of your site. This will do a couple of things. First it makes the navigation of the site easier for your visitors and second it gives the spiders more links to follow and makes sure they see every page on your site. Also link anchor text (meaning the actual text that is linked) on a page also helps with rankings so having a keyword rich menu could help you in the rankings.
KEYWORDS
When you look at a large site as a whole you will have an idea of what type of traffic you are looking for. Say, for example, you are going to be building a large link site (much like ones mentioned in this article I wrote about search engine friendly sites). The site will have a general theme, but it will also have different pages that will be competing for different keywords. A good idea to help you get strong rankings for different keywords is to break the site down into pages and optimize each page for its own keywords. For example let’s say your site has a lesbian page, an amateur page and a teen page. Instead of trying to optimize all three pages for all three keywords focus on each page as an individual. Optimize your lesbian page for the lesbian based keywords you want to rank in. Optimize the amateur page for amateur keywords and the teen page for teen keywords. You will have a much better chance of ranking well for these keywords if you have three different pages, each optimized separately, for individual keywords than if you tried to optimize them all for the same three keywords.
TITLE AND DESCRIPTION
On each page of your site you will want to have a nice keyword rich title and a nice keyword rich description tag. Don’t spam your keywords in here, but certainly put them in here. It is okay to have your site’s name in each page’s title to give it a uniform feel, just make sure you have a unique title and description for each page. Having every page with the same title is only going to hurt you.
TEXT IS KING
Search engine spiders love text and they are getting smarter and smarter. If you have a page on your site that only as 20 words on it and 10 of them are the keywords for your site, the search engine may punish you for this because it will look like you are trying to spam keywords. Instead you will want to have some nice text on the site that entices the surfer and makes sense to them, but also has some keywords sprinkled into it. Something I do with my link sites is that I have a nice 1-2 sentence description for each site telling the surfer what is in the site. Some of these descriptions will have the keywords for that niche in them. When I end up with a page of 30-50 site links and descriptions there will be a pretty large amount of text on the page with some nice keywords scattered throughout it. The spiders will see a page like this and feel like it has valuable information and has keywords on it so it will give it more relevancy in the search engine than a page that has 20 words with 10 of them being keywords.
NAME IT WELL
If you have a site with many different pages something that may have a small effect on the search engine ranks, but a big effect on visitor clicks is the name of your page. Say for example you have an amateur porn page. Your keywords and title all are optimized for amateur porn, but you name the page “page22.html” when someone sees your site returned in the rankings when they do a search for “amateur porn” they will see your page title and description and maybe some text from the page and below that it has your domain listed. With a generic page name it will show up as www.yoursite.com/page22.html but if you name the page after your keywords it would show up as www.yoursite.com/amateur-porn.html and the keywords in the url will be in bold so the visitor would actually see www.yoursite.com/amateur-porn.html. I don’t know about you, but I would be more likely to click on a url that looked like that as opposed to the generic url. There is also some debate as to whether this helps with rankings or not. I don’t know for sure if it does, but it couldn’t hurt.
SITEMAP
I’ve mentioned this in several articles I wrote so I will only briefly mention it here. Use the Google sitemap tool www.sitemap.org to make a sitemap of your site. It really helps Google and Yahoo to index your site.
INBOUND LINKS
Inbound links is one of the major factors in determining search engine rankings. The more sites you have pointing to your’s the more favorably the search engines look upon it. They assume that if a lot of sites are linking to you, you must be a good site. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of link trades and relevant inbound links, that is another article all together, but I will say that you should try to get inbound links to each of your different optimized pages on your site.
Using the example from earlier, if you have separate lesbian, amateur and teen pages you would want your lesbian related inbound links pointing to your lesbian page, your teen related inbound links pointing to your teen page and the amateur inbound links pointed to your amateur page. Since you have your site well designed and networked together with a good menu system the search engines will see the links all pointing to the overall domain, but they will also take into consideration the different links pointing to different individual pages when it comes to ranking those pages. Inbound links to individual pages is one of the reasons why you will see individual pages from sites come back in search results. If you do a search for “lesbian porn” you will see most of the results point to individual site pages not the main warning page of site. This is because those pages are well optimized for that keyword and there are inbound links to those pages telling the search engines that they are in fact popular pages so the search engine then assumes that they are relevant and ranks that page.
Working in the world of search engines can be a difficult thing. There are a million different factors that go into determining how a page or site ranks within the search engine. Having a site that is well built, useful to visitors and well networked so that it is search engine spider friendly can go a long ways towards helping you improve your rankings and getting you more search engine traffic.
Reader Comments: (1 posts)
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Ethanael says: Of the panoply of webtise I've pored over this has the most veracity. |
January 14th, 2012 at 12:36pm EST Rating:  |
