How to Make Search Engines Love You
Search engines find your web site using little programs called “robots” or “spiders” that search the internet for new content. These are busy little beavers, continually scouring the internet for the latest and greatest information. If you know how to cater to them you’ll get your site noticed by search engines.
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First and foremost there’s one concept that you can’t go wrong with: the more human-friendly your site is, the more search engine friendly is will be. I’ll mention this in several tutorials.
It’s pretty simple–search engine spiders are trying to look at each web site they encounter as if they were human. If something is good or helpful for a human visitor, a search engine will give you a better rank. Here’s what I mean…
Humans like fresh content: Human visitors like new content to read. If you put new pages and text on your web site on a regular basis, people will come to your site more often to read it.
Likewise, the more often you update and add new content the more often search engines will search your site and index your new content. If you post new stories on your blog a couple times a week, Google might visit your site once a week to see what is new and add it to their search results. Google will visit larger sites (like, for example, CNN.com) several times a day because the web site is updated continually throughout the day.
So, to get your web site visited regularly by a spider, you want to update your site as often as possible. If you stop adding new content for 6 six months, a spider will act like a human visitor would–they’ll visit less and less frequently until they stop visiting completely.
Making content accessible: Humans like to be able to find new content. If you create a new page and you put a link from your home page to that new page, it’s easy for people to find the new page. Whereas if you put a new page on your site but you don’t link to it, human visitors can’t find that page.
Spiders find content by following links too. Once you’ve got a new page on your site, you want to make sure there is a link to the new content so a spider can find it.
One thing you can do to make sure search engines visit all the important pages on your site is create a site map. A site map is simply a list of links to each of the important pages on your site. For an example, visit MyEZBills.com. This is an old client of mine, and if you look in the lower right-hand corner you’ll see a “site map” link.
A search engine that finds this link will quickly gain access to all the pages on the web site. The spider can just go down the list. A site map is also helpful for your human visitors. If someone can’t find the information they’re looking for, a quick visit to the site map can point them in the right direction.
Outgoing links: If you’re giving a human visitor useful information, you would probably link to other resources around the internet that would also be useful for your visitors to visit (like my link to MyEZBills above). If you have a lot of content, it’s expected that it will include links that leave your site.
Without outgoing links you become a stagnant “Dead Sea” website–links go in but they don’t go out. Since links to other resources off of your site are helpful to humans, search engine spiders want to see them on your site.
Things that spiders can’t handle
Despite their best efforts, search engine spiders aren’t human. As such there are some things you should be aware of that work fine for humans but make your site difficult for spiders to search:
Flash navigation: If the links on your web site are made of Flash animation, it’s hard for spiders to follow the links. Search engines will eventually be able to navigate a Flash site, but for now it’s difficult for them.
Password protected pages: All of the advanced tutorials on the IMFBO web site can’t be searched because spiders don’t have a username and a password to get to the content. So that content on this web site will never be searched by the search engines (until that fine day arrives that Google trains their spiders to open a PayPal account and pay me money each month) (that’s unlikely).
External scripts: Sometimes the links of your site are created using external scripts. Some advanced navigation, like drop-down menus, use external files that make it hard for spiders to follow (e.g. <script type=’text/javascript’ src=’menu_nav.js’></script>).
Dynamic HTML: Any DHTML scripts where the <a href> link is found within javascript code is harder for spiders to read (e.g. <a onMouseOut=”MM_swapImgRestore()” onMouseOver=”MM_swapImage(’document.link’,'document. link’,'images/link2.gif’,'#930247173868′)” href=”link.html”> <img src=”images/link.gif”></a>).
(if that previous line made any sense to you whatsoever, you’re a bigger nerd than I am)
Frames: Frames are a way of displaying two html files on one page. They were used a lot to let you scroll around a page while keeping the site navigation in one spot. An older way of creating a web site, frames still have their uses but spiders have a hard time indexing them properly.
If you want to see an example of frames in action, you can visit Jarom’s very first web page created in 1998 (warning–this is, in fact, the very first web page I ever created. It’s a collection of jokes, and it’s not very pretty…).
If you’re still taking me at all seriously after that jokes page, you should seriously consider becoming a full member of my site so you can get access to the advanced tutorials mentioned above (because Google’s spiders certainly won’t be finding them any time soon). There are a lot of other benefits to membership you should be aware of too.