Website Usability: Making Sure Your Website Is Friendly

This post was written by Internet Marketing John on June 2, 2010
Posted Under: Website Usability

Making sure your website is friendly to the search engines, is the first and most important thing you need to do when building your site.

smiley_success2 In order for successful indexing to occur; making sure your website is “friendly” to the search engines is of paramount importance.

There are several things you can do to expedite the process that won’t cost you an arm and a leg to implement.

First, make sure you incorporate properly formatted, front loaded, keyword rich URLs, free from any parameters.

Use any of the many free keyword research tools available on the Internet to choose “universally searched” targeted keywords for the best possible result.

Doing this immediately, enhances the chance for your website to rank well for the targeted keywords you selected.

Analyze the information infrastructure of your website, including the newer technologies you will use such as Flash, JavaScript, or Ajax.

The search engines cannot properly index flash, and these type technologies. The search engine crawlers don’t have the ability to see through these technologies, or understand the content and themes included in those type presentations.

Your site navigation structure, is another component that should also be checked to make sure your website is friendly to both the search engines and your users.

Identify any obstructions or PageRank flow issues that the search engine spiders might have problems with, and make adjustments to ensure they that they are able to see and index, all public content on your website.

Another way of making sure your website is friendly to the search engines, is to set up an HTML sitemap with a list of links to all pages of your site.

By hosting all your page links with a registered XML sitemap; it makes them more accessible and visible to the search engine spiders, as well as your website users.

Sitemaps greatly improve navigation and site visibility.

You can make your site navigation more “crawlable” for the search engines by using Cascading Style Sheets.

CSS helps to minimize the amount of formatting in the HTML page code, which makes it easier for the search engines to crawl your site.

The last thing you need to do to make sure your website is friendly to the search engines and improve your site’s indexing quality; is to remove any duplicate content you find on your site, and optimize your Flash or Java Script elements.