Archive for November, 2009
Use Robots.txt to disallow spiders from specific pages or sections
Robots.txt is a file in your server which tells various search engine crawlers not to crawl or index specific parts of your site. It can tell certain search engines to ig‐nore certain pages, or tell all engines to ignore your site altogether. Even for op‐timization, you might want to hide certain parts of your site from search engines. For example, if your site has a “terms and conditions” page which is similar to most such pages on other sites and serves no search purpose, or you don’t want bots to crawl your cgi‐bin directory, or have any other directories or pages with duplicate content, you can use this file to tell search engines to ignore them:
A robots.txt file looks like this:
User-Agent: [Bot or Spider name]
Disallow: [File or Directory name]
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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language which makes your design more flexible and separates your layout code from the content of each page. CSS enables web designers to easily implement site‐wide changes without going into each page or accidentally messing with their content. CSS also reduces the size of your pages and makes it easier for spiders to find your content – the most im‐portant thing on your page – easily and quickly.
This is standard practice in the web industry any experienced Web design company should be using this methology.
Make sure that search engines don’t come up against badly coded pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established global standards for HTML and CSS in web pages. In addition to testing for cross‐browser functionality, test each page of your website for errors by using W3C’s validator.
All sites produced by webdesignpreston.org.uk will be checked and re-checked to ensure they are error free
Optimizing for Spiders
Of course, there is more to SEO than user experience. For instance, a common design mistake is the use of ‘splash pages’ – a home page or main entry page with only a large image with a link to an inner page. While users may find it ar‐resting or interesting, a splash page will hurt your site because it keeps you from using keyword‐rich text and links, and often redirects automatically to another page.
Optimizing Each Page
In addition to optimizing your site design, there are a number of standard SEO practices that should be followed on each page of your website. Keep the follow‐ing tips in mind when creating a page:
- Each page should be optimized for 1‐2 keywords only. If you find it hard to narrow the content down to only a couple of keywords, consider dividing it into two or more pages.
- Every page should have at least 250 words of content, and the title should always contain keywords.
While the quality of your content is the most important feature of your website, the structure and usability of your website play a significant role in ensuring that search crawlers as well as visitors can access and understand information easily.
Building a user‐friendly website is crucial to building a website that is optimized for search engines. And since the entire point of SEO is to attract more visitors to your website, making a functional, easily useable website should be an obvious part of your traffic‐building efforts.
The internet is all about convenience. Visitors have short attention spans and deeply entrenched surfing habits, so your website should be designed to make their navigation and reading experience as easy as possible. For instance, most users expect to find the site logo on the top left of a website, and to be able to get to the homepage by clicking on it. Contrasting background colors and large images also make for an effortless browsing experience.
