Creating a Search Engine Friendly Website

11 Sep 10

Creating a search engine friendly website is simple - your content must be mostly in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, movies, applets, etc. are not visible to search engines. Therefore, when presenting non-textual content on your page, it must be accompanied by some kind of text transcript, for example:

• Images must have ALT attributes assigned.
• Java or Flash plugins must have their content repeated in text format.
• Movies must have a text summary somewhere on the page.

Your website must also have crawlable link structure. This means that every page you want to promote must be accessible via a direct link, and not "blocked" because of one of the following reasons:

• Link is only accessible after you submit a form - search engines cannot process forms.
• Too many links on a page - keep it under 100. Normally search engines only crawl about 100 links for every page.
• Links are in Frames or iFrames. Search engine cannot understand the structure of a "framed" website therefore your website might not be catalogued correctly.
• Ensure links aren’t blocked by robots.txt or the meta robots tag.
• Links are in a Java, Flash component, or other plugins.
• Links are "trapped" inside complex Javascript.

keywords: search engine friendly, crawlable content