Many people tend to forget how important making your website SEO friendly is. Ok we all know how important of-site optimisation is and without it your website is very likely to fail. However many website owners forget that your on-site optimisation is very important as well. If you website is well optimised for the search engines this will go a long way to help your site rank better.
There are many, many factors that you need to get right onsite and this should be considered when building your website. Below I will discuss some of the basic things you should have on your website.
Text navigation
Flash and JavaScript navigation is all well and good but sadly the engines have a hard time reading them. (Although Google has made public that it’s beginning to index Flash far more effectively). Therefore it is a good idea to also display a text version of your navigation somewhere else on your website. This is usually at the bottom. This will help the search engines spider your website more effectively.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are good two fold, on one hand a search engine spider can enter your sitemap and easily navigate throughout you whole website. I would also recommend you submit a sitemap.xml to Google. The other good use for sitemaps is for visitors to easily find the information they are looking for within one webpage. Your sitemap will give a bird’s eye view of you website. That is if you have structured it correctly.
Orphan Pages
If you have orphan pages within your website then search engines are going to have a very hard time finding them, furthermore, once they do find it then they will have a hard job exiting from it, if you don’t have proper navigation on the page. So for this reason you should make sure that all your pages are interlinked to make then easy to spider.
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One other thing I would like to mention is content, make sure you have plenty of interesting content in your website and plenty of text. The search engine spiders like pages that have plenty of original content. I would recommend at least 4-5 hundred words minimum. Also make sure you grow your website on a regular basis as this will help both the returning visitors and the search engines alike.
