Search Engine Friendly Website

A beautifully designed website is useless and defeats its purpose if it is invisible in the eyes of search engines like Google. Creating a search engine friendly website should rank high in priority during the web development process. By following simple guidelines I've written below, you can have a website that have a better chance of ranking well in most search engines.

Use Images and Flash Animation Sparingly

Search engine technology has advanced a great deal since the dawn of the Internet revolution. Unfortunately, search engines are still unable to read images and index their content. Therefore, beautifully designed websites, which are made up of image maps alone or solely use Flash, are not search engine friendly. Animated splash pages created in Macromedia Flash will stop search engine spiders from indexing the rest of the site. Even the most advanced search engines will have trouble reading Flash commands and unable to follow the links/navigations.

We all know that content is king in the world of search engines. Content will give you popularity and high rankings. But, only a certain type of content will give you high marks with search engines. In reality, content with mostly text is king. Text is known as "spider food" in the search engine world. Images may look great to users, but text is friendly and "appetizing" to search engine spiders.

Keep Your Page Layouts Simple

In the 1990's, designers used HTML frames extensively to create their page layouts. Framed pages typically have links/navigation on the left side or top bar. Even though this layout may help user navigation, it is not friendly to search engines. In many cases, search engines have difficult times in determining which page the content actually resides in. As a rule, framed pages should not be used unless there is a reason worth loosing popularity with search engines.