Off-Page SEO Basics
As I mentioned in a previous post, there are a number of off-page factors that can prevent your website from being indexed or ranked. This is one area where you may need a programmer or designer to make changes to the structure and coding of your website to remove these barriers.
Here is a brief description of a few of these possible barriers:
1. Reliable Hosting – If your website is constantly down because of hosting problems, the search engines will stop indexing your web page.
2. Directory structure - A good navigation, internal link structure and site map makes it easier for search engines spiders and users to browse your website. However, if you use a flash or image based navigation you should also have a text-based footer to make it easy for the search engines to navigation through your website.
3. URL structure – Even though search engines have gotten better at indexing dynamic URLs like http://www.mysite.com/index.jsp?c_id=cat1_p_id=prod1 you are better off creating search engine friendly URLs like http://www.mysite.com/cat1/prod1 because not only does it make it easier for the search engines to index these pages but they also help users see where they are on your site.
4. CSS & JavaScript – Moving all your CSS and JavaScript to external files not only reducing the amount of code that the search engines have to crawl but also allows you to make global changes to your website instead of having to make changes to every page on your website.
5. Flash Based website – Let me start out by saying that I love flash and think they are necessary for websites but your entire site should not be flash based. The search engines can’t read flash, so they are not able to know what your site is all about. It is like having text as part of an image. The search engines can not see that text to know what it says. The same can be said about flash.
6. Frames – The issue here is that search engines see frames as separate pages, so if the search engine indexes the half of your page that does not include your navigation then this may cause issues for your users.
7. Custom Error Page – Sometimes you remove pages from your website, people type in the name of a page on your website or people mistype when linking to your website and you do not want to lose any visitors that come to your website. A custom error page tells users that your website is still there and tries to lead them to the correct place. Plus no one wants to see the Internet Explorer “Page Can Not Be Found” error page.
These are just a few of the barriers that you need to pay attention to if you want to make sure your website is search engine friendly.
Related Posts:
- On-Page SEO Basics
- Why Your Website Needs a Site Map
- Eight Easy Ways to Get Your Own Links
- What’s Your Story & Why Should I buy from you?
- Three Reasons Why You NEED Link Building?
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