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Is your HTML code spider friendly?

This is the first question to ponder when evaluating a website for SEO. Search engine spiders have a limited amount of time to crawl a website, so it is absolutely important that their time is spent crawling your relevant content. Using common sense coding habits and creating clean code will usually facilitate this, but there are many other techniques that can make your site easier to index.

I have found the following techniques to be very effective when building a spider friendly website.

Do not overload your pages with graphics. Flash and java look great but they are invisible to the search engines. Having too much of either will only clutter your pages and use up valuable crawling time. Moderation is the key. It is possible to make a website that is both attractive and spider friendly. Just remember to put your java and CSS in external files.

Meta tags no longer carry the weight that they once had, but they are still worth writing. The meta description should get the most attention because it is used to describe your pages in the SERP’s, and each page should have a unique description otherwise it may be ignored by the spiders.

Title tags are of utmost importance. These tags tell the spider what your pages are about and they are also the first line in the SERP’s. Some types of websites (i.e.dynamic/e-commerce) may require reconfiguring (mod_rewrite) the server to generate correct title tags.

Spiders tend to read your pages just like we do, top to bottom and left to right. Knowing this, you should always put your most pertinent information at the top of your page. This is one reason for having keywords and phrases at the beginning of your text. Also relocating extraneous code will make room to move your text closer to the top.

Spiders love header tags (h1, h2, etc.), but make sure to use only one H1 tag per page or it may be viewed as spam. Also, be sure to define your header tags in the CSS to make your site more visually pleasing.

Use tableless designs (XHTML & CSS) to avoid hiding your content from the spiders. Tables have a tendency to bury content.

Use a robots.text file to hide unimportant content and scipts from spiders. This will make your coding much cleaner.

Spider simulators, like the one Summit Media offers, are available to test your code and determine whether or not it is spider friendly. I recommend using these to refine and trouble shoot your design.

These are basic but important coding techniques that every SEO should be familiar with. If you’ve been concentrating on link building and your rankings haven’t improved, maybe you should take a look at your HTML code. The web (code) that you have woven may be too tangled for even a spider to crawl.

Once again search engines are giving in to the requests of governments, and this time Yahoo! is the turncoat (for the third time). Apparently, Yahoo! handed some email drafts (that’s right, DRAFTS) over to the Chinese government that led to another arrest.

Now I consider email to be about as secure as a post card, but a draft is more like an incomplete thought or a letter that hasn’t been written. The fact that Yahoo! turned over this information is just as disturbing as the thought of being arrested for a letter that never left your mailbox.

This whole situation is disturbing because more and more big corporations are jumping into bed with our communist allies. Even Bill Gates is now breaking bread with the president of China.

This news should serve as a warning for anyone who actually thinks that their email is truly private.

I like to stress the importance of link building when trying to increase your website traffic. Search engines are constantly changing the ways that they rank web pages based on on-page factors (coding, navigation, url’s, keywords, etc), but they will always give precedence to websites with good inbound links or off-page factors.

I recently ran across an article called “10 steps to getting links to your site” by Craig Fitield, who happens to be a product manager and search engine marketer at Microsoft.
His advice is valuable to any link building campaign, but the fact that it is coming from a member of the Microsoft team proves that even Microsoft bases their search engine primarily on link popularity.

Most of Craig’s tips are geared towards organizing your efforts (i.e. setting goals and using spreadsheets) and the rest are just good linking habits. While it isn’t new advice, it is good, sound advice worth repeating.

I would, however, like to add a few of my own tips:

When contacting a potential link partner for the first time via email, put extra effort into writing subject lines. Todd has a really good post on this and he also gives some examples of good and bad subjects.

Before getting a link, make sure that your link provider isn’t attaching a no-follow tag to the links on his website. If this is the case, don’t waste your time unless you stand to gain a definite traffic increase from having a link with them. Firefox has a toolbar feature that will highlight the no-follow links on a page.

Remember that when you link to a website, you will automatically be associated with that site by the search engines. So choose your friends wisely because if they are guilty of spamming, you too will be considered guilty by association.

Once you have done enough link building you will see that there is a methodology to it. Experience and creativity will then lead you to develop your own techniques.

Good Luck
iTraffic Control

Sometimes it’s the little, overlooked details that can really affect your online traffic.

I think that we tend to focus too much on the latest and greatest, and we stop looking for those small details. Dan Thies (aka The SEO Coach) has a recent post titled “SEO: Where’s your homepage?” that, I think, is a must read for anyone, like myself, who pays attention to details. In his post writes about a common flaw in home page url’s that many people tend to overlook, and he explains ways to link to your homepage that will help you avoid duplicate content penalties. This is priceless information when you consider how important url’s are to search engines.

Dan’s blog is fairly new, but I expect to see many more good SEO posts from him in the future. This is definitely one to bookmark.

The development of e-commerce has given small businesses a chance to compete with large companies in a world wide market, and now it is easier than ever to market and sell products online. Some small businesses, however, have opted to refrain from e-commerce because they are intimidated by the big businesses, but believe it or not, being a small store with a simple website can be a major advantage online.

Time and time again low budget websites have proven that function is more important than form when it comes to converting website traffic into sales. Take plentyoffish.com for example, this is an absolutely ugly website that supposedly earns $10,000 a day from Google advertising.

Low end websites have a way of conveying trust, which is vital, since many people do not trust large corporations. Most consumers would rather buy (regardless of price) from smaller companies, with low budget websites because they feel like they are helping the little guy in his battle against “The Man”.

So the trick is to design an attractive website that has the appearance of a mom and pop store as opposed to a department store. Major corporations have caught on to this and are beginning to apply it to their websites. Some corporations even create new/smaller companies to sell their products online.

Here are a few ways to improve your website and compete with “The Man”:

First, I suggest cutting back on things like flash (it’s distracting and invisible to search engines) and java script (also invisible) that makes your website appear expensive and busy. A simple flash banner will suffice without interfering with the focus of the pages.

Second, remove page clutter. It is not necessary to fill every empty space on a page. Clutter and information overload will be a deterrent and create a spammy appearance. Research has shown that increasing white space on pages helps people to concentrate on your products and increase conversions. Moderation is the key.

Third, offer reassurance. Every page should have something on it, in the body or elsewhere, reassuring the visitors that you are honest and qualified. Also provide info about yourself (or company). Visitors are more likely to trust you if they know more about who you are and where you’re from (location is important).

The point I am trying to make is that you shouldn’t sacrifice usability for appearance. Instead, build an intuitive website first then tweak the look and feel later. The products and text on your pages are more important than your drop down menus and flashy graphics.

Keep this in mind when building your pages and you will maximize your profits from online traffic.