Search engines encounter two kinds of obstacles:
• Technical challenges that prevent the search engine spider from accessing content.
• A competitive marketing environment where everyone wants to rank highly.
To ensure that search engines can access your content, you must remove technical barriers. Those who want to achieve the best results must follow best practices. These best practices are outlined in the on Web Development and Design.
The key is to make sure that there are direct HTML links to each page you want the search engines to index. The most important pages should be accessible directly from the home page of your website.
The information architecture, or how content is planned and laid out, has important usability and SEO implications. Users want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, while website owners want search engine spiders to be able to access and index all applicable pages. In fact, Google has released an update that penalises sites with poor user experience (such as no content above the fold,
or a high bounce rate) (Cutts, 2012).
There are times when user experience and SEO can be at odds with each other, but usually if you focus on building usable, accessible websites, you have made them search engine friendly as well.
Another technical challenge to search engines is Flash. For the most part, search engines struggle to crawl and index Flash sites. There are some workarounds, but the best approach from an SEO perspective is to avoid building sites or delivering key content in Flash. Instead, use HTML5, which provides similar interactivity and visuals while remaining easily crawlable.
The on web development and design delves more deeply into building a search engine friendly website.
• Technical challenges that prevent the search engine spider from accessing content.
• A competitive marketing environment where everyone wants to rank highly.
To ensure that search engines can access your content, you must remove technical barriers. Those who want to achieve the best results must follow best practices. These best practices are outlined in the on Web Development and Design.
The key is to make sure that there are direct HTML links to each page you want the search engines to index. The most important pages should be accessible directly from the home page of your website.
The information architecture, or how content is planned and laid out, has important usability and SEO implications. Users want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, while website owners want search engine spiders to be able to access and index all applicable pages. In fact, Google has released an update that penalises sites with poor user experience (such as no content above the fold,
or a high bounce rate) (Cutts, 2012).
There are times when user experience and SEO can be at odds with each other, but usually if you focus on building usable, accessible websites, you have made them search engine friendly as well.
Another technical challenge to search engines is Flash. For the most part, search engines struggle to crawl and index Flash sites. There are some workarounds, but the best approach from an SEO perspective is to avoid building sites or delivering key content in Flash. Instead, use HTML5, which provides similar interactivity and visuals while remaining easily crawlable.
The on web development and design delves more deeply into building a search engine friendly website.
