Crawler Friendly - Design with SEO in Mind
Even before we get to the HTML and text on your pages, there are things you can
do to give your SEO strategy the best chance of success. The structure of your
site (directory paths, page depth, etc) and the navigation scheme you choose
(css menu, javascript menu, dynamic html, left hand side, top nav bar, etc)
will all play a part in determining the accessability of your site to the
crawlers.
What is Crawler Friendly Design?
Crawler friendly design involves making your site design decisions with the
crawlers in mind. Any feature, now matter how cool, that will
prevent the crawlers from doing their job should be discarded or
modified to serve the needs of both human and robot users. In my experience,
there is always a crawler friendly alternative. So ...
Rule #1 : Let the crawlers do their job.
Remember that a Search Engine Crawler is a software program. Software programs
in general do not deal well with the unexpected - and Search Engine Crawlers
are no exception. We want to make it as easy as possible for the crawler to
complete its mission, which is to traverse your site from top to bottom and
report back to the Search Engine company on what it found. Anything that
prevents the crawler from easily navigating around your site is an unneccesary
obstacle in our path to high rankings. Some of the more common mistakes in this
area are:
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<Over-use of Javascript>
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<Complex Navigation>
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<Session driven Sites>
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<Complex Querystrings>
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etc
We'll cover all these issues and more in the other articles in this section.
Exception - there may be areas of your site
which you do not require the crawlers to visit. An example might
be your shopping cart page if you have one. With pages like these, where
there is no value in having them crawled, there is no point in spending time
evolving crawler friendly mechanisms. Just do whatever is easiest. But remember
to ensure that the page you treat in this manner is not a necessary gateway
page for getting the crawlers to deeper areas within your site.
OK, so let's assume we've got a site that the crawlers can navigate. What's the
next consideration? Well, the crawler's job is to determine the relevance of
our page in relation to a given keyword or keyphrase. To do this, it will
examine our page in detail and make some decisions. Anything we can do at the
design stage to improve our chances of the crawlers viewing our page in a
positive light is to our advantage.
Rule #2 : Let the crawlers do their job well.
I know, it's almost identical to #1. But it isn't the same. Rule #1 deals with
physically allowing the crawlers access to your site. Rule #2 is about helping
them to gain a positive impression once they get there. Use design
principles that complement the crawler's view of your site. An example would be
avoiding deep directory paths. Many of the crawlers, including everyone's
favourite Googlebot, assume that pages deep in a directory structure are less
important than those closer to the root. Other examples, all covered in more
detail elsewhere in the site, are:
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Create attractive URLs
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Page Titles
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Page Weight
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Breadcrumb
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etc
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