by Idea Lab

If a website isn’t designed to be search engine friendly it may not get listed in some search engines. Here are ten suggestions for improving the search engine friendliness of websites:

1. Flash is a creative way to visually enhance a site but should be avoided if used without an accompanying “Skip Intro” link or if it is intended to force viewers to watch. Most people don’t want to wait around for a slow loading Flash page and search engines are not able to see imbedded Flash content at all. Search engines are interested in site content, text links and structural tags.

2. Google generally does not index sites that require session IDs. Session IDs are used to track a users activity on a particular visit. These are usually included on sites that have a Shopping Cart. To find out how many of your site’s pages are being indexed, type: inurl:yourdomainhere.com in Google’s search box and see the number of results posted. If Google only has 1 or 2 pages indexed, this could be the fault of session Ids.

3. Creating unique Title tags on every page of a site using targeted keywords to draw the attention of spiders as they index your site for certain keywords or key phrases. If the Title tag is generic for all pages of your site, great opportunities are missed to reinforce the content that is found on those pages.

4. Some sites require that their users enable cookies before browsing the site. Cookies are files placed on a computer to remember a users preferences for a particular site (very useful for sites that have shopping carts). If a search engine spider happens upon this same warning, it will abandon the indexing of that site. The spider is a text only reader and cannot go through the process of enabling cookies. According to the NetMechanic, it is possible to program a site to recognize search engine spiders and allow them to index without requiring cookies.

5. Many search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript coding and will not follow JavaScript links. When using JavaScript make sure the HTML code for the links also uses the traditional tag.

6. Use a tool to view a site in a non-graphical browser (like Lynx, www.delorie.com). If you can click through the text links in a non-graphical browser, then a Search Engine spider should be able to as well. It may help to address potential issues.

7. Most search engine spiders do not see drop down menus. If you use drop down menus, make sure to include the navigation as html text links in another location on the page as well.

8. Add an html text link to a sitemap in the bottom navigation as an easy way for search engine spiders to find all the pages on a site.

9. Make sure the site navigation is in html text links, not only graphic buttons.

10. Ensure that all meta data is intact and optimized.

Following these points will make a site more search engine friendly.

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