SEO Diva

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The way you design your site will affect your search engine rankings. You want to make it as search-friendly as possible in every way.

1. The quality of your site counts.

If your site is to customers in your category, search engines want to rank you highly.

2. Search Engines are computer programs.

If your website is laid out in a confusing and disorganized fashion, or if the links between your pages are difficult for a spider to find, your site will not be crawled optimally.

Write Well-Formed Code

The easier you make it for search engine spiders to process the code on your pages, the better your chances for success.

Keep Your URLs Simple

A site with short, static-looking URLs is likely to be crawled more efficiently and achieve a higher number of pages indexed than a comparable site that relies heavily on dynamically-generate pages.

Avoid Session IDs

Google states: Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

If you must use session IDs for tracking purposes, store them in cookies instead of your URLs.

Employ a Flat Directory Structure

Pages that are several subdirectory levels deep will often get spidered less frequently.

Use a Site Map

By creating a good site map and linking to it from your homepage and every other page on your site, you ensure that each page on your site is only one click away from your site map and only two clicks away from your home page. This is the optimum structure in terms of making web pages easy for the search engine spiders to find it.

Robots.txt File

Robots.txt files are used for only one reason – to tell search engines spiders which pages not to index:

* Shopping cart pages
* Cgi-bin folder
* Directories that contain images or sensitive company data

Warning: If you add the following two lines to your robots.txt file, it’s enough to keep all the major search engines from ever crawling your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Size Limit

Keep Each Page’s File Size Under 101k

Frames

Can be used but best avoided

JavaScript

The more JavasScript, the less chances of showing up high on a search engine search.

Best Practice: Put the script contents in a remote.js file:

<script language=JavaScript src=o”javascript/remotefile.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Flash

Most flash consists of images. Search engines now have the capability of reading the text in flash, but to date it is not showing up in the cached files.

• Don’t make your entire page one big Flash file. Make sure there is abundant indexable content on the page. You can place it below the fold if you want to, but don’t try to hide it.
• Sites with name recognition, like Gap.com or RedBull.com have name recognition and can get away with heavy amounts of Flash. Unless you have a Red Bull-size marketing budget, you don’t get this luxury.

Get The SEO Book for an excellent SEO resource.

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