How to look at your page through the eyes of the spider – How search engine friendly is your site really?

My site is not performing well on Google. How bad is it? – Well on the scale of one to ten, ten being the worst case scenario its about 11. Google.com is the number one search engine in the world and if your site is not indexed on google.com I hope you are not interested in traffic otherwise you have some work to do.

I don’t really understand what I should do with my site to make it search engine friendly – Don’t be so hard on yourself. Most people don’t understand and it is considered the most debated topic amongst SEO specialists.

Here I highlight common mistakes you should stay away from to have a better chance with the search engines.

Optimize your site for the correct keywords
In a nut shell you need to decide what keywords you can be ranked for. If you have a small website in a very saturated market then ranking for the major keywords will be hardly accomplishable. You can use http://www.Rankchecker.net tool together with your own traffic reporting software to find out what keywords are used to find your site today and work on improving your site for these specific keywords. Start out small don’t jump over your head. SEO is a process not a task.

Source Code Errors.
If your site has code errors such as http://www.jsmadeeasy.com Errors, HTML Errors, CSS or any other programming language bugs, you are most likely get panelized by search engines and in some cases even excluded from their search results.

Frames
Back in the day we used to say if you want to get indexed by search engines stay away from Frames. In my own personal opinion it is still true. Although most search engines now index frames you are still running a risk of misrepresentation and incorrect indexing. Imagine wrong frame gets indexed individually and a visitor gets to see that mess what are the chances that visitor every coming back to your site?

If you have to use frames provide a way for your users to get back to the homepage of your website. However I would strongly recommend not using frames at all.

Using JavaScript navigation
Using Javascript Navigation on your  website is not that bad or dangerous however understand that some search engines may not be able to understand JavaScript and will not be able to index your site. So what you have to do is make sure you use NONSCRIPT tag to replicate the navigation specifically for the search engine spiders.

Flash content
It is said that Google can index Macromedia Flash files, however the quality of that technology is open to debate. No other search engine is capable of indexing flash files. I would strongly suggest that you stay away from flash content if Organic Traffic is important to you.

If you have to use flash you can used standard HTML alternative within NOEMBED tags.

Can I use Dynamic URLs?
Although it is said that most search engines are able to follow dynamic URLS, I would advise to stay away from using them. If you must use dynamic URL’s consider the following suggestions:

1.       Do not use &ID= as a parameter in your URLs

2.       When possible use absolute rather than relative links.

No sitemap
A sitemap is the SEO method of choice. Sitemap will increase your chances of getting every page within your website to be indexed by all search engines. Link your sitemap from all your pages on your site. Do not list more than 100 links on the sitemap page if you have more categorize and have split sitemap pages and link them together.

About The Author
Steve Slavutskiy is co-founded MetaChecker.Net as well as RankChecker.net  He has been researching and developing SEO strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998.

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