Search Engine Friendly website, points to remember Part 2

In our previous blog post (Search Engine Friendly website, points to remember Part 1) we discussed some of the issues we believe a web designer or web developer should look into while designing a website for their customers.

Some of the headings discussed previously were:

• Design website using CSS (cascading Style Sheet) only and without tables
• Dynamic title, description, keywords
• Search Engine Friendly website address
• Optimising for image search by using alt tags for graphics and image links
• Include Breadcrumb with links for every page

This article explores further some more points for creating a search engine friendly website.

One URL for the homepage

What the above statement means is that from a search engine perspective url with domain.com.au (without www) and www.domain.com.au (with www) are different page for search engines. For search engines every page is different and having identical content for www.domain.com.au and domain.com.au is more like two website address with the same content and most web designers tend to ignore this. Creating 301 redirection or permanent redirection from www.domain.com.au to domain.com.au or vice versa will avoid the issue of having two urls with the same content. Creating a redirection is also likely to boost PageRank concentration of your Homepage.

Xml sitemap

Creating XML sitemap helps search engines to easily understand how many pages you have on your website, when the page was uploaded and frequency of updates of the page. Creating a dynamic/static sitemap will help search engines including Google to keep their index database fresh and it is easier for their crawler to follow links from a XML sitemap as all links are in one simple file. You can submit your website’s XML sitemap from webmaster Google, webmaster Yahoo and webmaster Bing.

Removing javascript from header

Some websites have a lot of long javascripts written on the content pages making search engine crawlers difficult to reach the actual content. Having long javascript on the actual page itself is likely to push your main content below and it also makes it harder for search engine crawlers to easily reach and index your main content. Ideally Javascripts should be removed from the page and placed in a separate file. This will help the actual content to be pushed up and enable search engine crawlers to easily index the main content easily.

Create 404 page

Creating a 404 page is helpful for your website visitors and also helps search engine crawlers understand of non existent page. There could be a link from external websites or internal pages to a particular page and you could have accidently deleted this page. With 404 page you could gracefully supply relevant information to your website visitors and direct them where to go or provide additional information.

Contextual link

It is necessary for a website designer or a web developer to understand customers targeted keywords and while uploading the website content it would be help in search engine optimization if contextual links to page is created for customer’s target keywords.

Implement Google analytics and create Google webmaster login

Implementing Google analytics and creating Webmaster login for a domain is more of a Search engine optimization work. In our personal experience it is beneficial for customers as they can view their traffic and view statistics of their website. Importantly if a customer wishes to engage search engine optimization firm later for their website. Installing Google analytics and Google webmaster would help the Search engine optimization company in viewing their potential customers past website traffic and statistics and would help in their research and proposal.

Hope this article provides insights to upcoming web designers and web developers. We welcome your feedback and comment.