Make search engines your friend

When building or modifying a website, you can (and should) use this opportunity to make your website search engine friendly. There are several things you can do that will significantly increase your website’s chance of getting higher rankings.

Search engines have a job to do: they must crawl through the enormous amount of content on the web, categorise and index the websites, and come with a list of results for certain keywords in order of relevance. It’s a big job. Why don’t you try helping them out?

Search engine spiders that crawl the pages can read certain pages and types of content better than others. Some kinds of content are unreadable, and some website navigation and linking structures can confuse or ‘trap’ the spiders.

Make your website more spider-friendly by using simple navigational structures:

• flat site structure (not too many links to get to important content)
• using text links (spiders can’t read images or flash)
• providing relevant keywords in prominent places and metatags
• don’t have compulsory form submission or registration to explore the site – spiders can’t fill out forms!

If you do these things, the search engines will reward your thoughtfulness with higher rankings and increase your visibility. Those spiders are powerful allies – do everything you can to make them happy