Web Design Articles
FREE comprehensive articles and information for our customers to help them decide how to develop a first class award winning website.. with a little help from us! wed deisgn preston.
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.
Content Management or CMS system, allows users to easily update content on there websites and produce very complex looking sites with relative ease.
Over the past few years Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) like Wordpress, Joomla, b2evolution and ExpressionEngine have revolutionized the creation and design of sites by providing ready to use publishing platforms.
A sitemap represents the architecture of your website, clarifying the hierarchy of all your pages, starting with the home page. (See Pickaweb’s own site map as an example.) Even if your website is relatively small, creating a sitemap will give you a lot of SEO benefits: notably, it will make your site easy to crawl, help the flow of trust (PageRank) between your pages, and alert search engines to changes (new or removed pages) in your website. Site maps are easy to create and can be made in a number of formats, with XML being the most common and widely ac‐cepted. (You can find a free online site map generator here.)
Use 301 redirects for moved or deleted pages
What happens when you remove or change the location of an indexed page or your entire site? Users may continue to find it as a result in Google’s database, but when they arrive, they won’t find anything. Alternatively, if your old page has accumulated high rankings or trust (PageRank) in search engines, deleting or removing it will mean that you’ve wasted all that hard work.
