| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|
About 4specs |
Basic Search Engine OptimizationYou may have received phone calls and emails offering to get your site higher in the rankings - for a substantial fee. Most websites I look at have several common problems that can be easily changed to substantially improve the number of users sent by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. The cost of the work outlined here on your home page, to include adding Google Analytics, should be under $2,500, perhaps under $1,000 if there is no redesign required. Once the basic work is done on the home page, you can decide to focus on individual pages and optimize them. Just getting your home page modified should increase your referrals. Even if you are planning a major site update, cleaning up the home page should still be done. The problems I see can be classified into 4 categories: 1. Sites using a splash page, frames or all flash Frames are an older design technique intended to get around the difficulty of updating header and footers without having to edit each page. Today, programs like Dreamweaver work with code includes and make updates to the headers and footers on each page simple. Flash looks good, but flash based sites typically have little information and can be difficult to navigate. The use of a few flash images or movies is okay; the use of complete flash sites with no html alternate is not okay. Your designer focused on making the flash pages pretty and forgot that the user is there to get information. 8 years ago Jakob Neilsen wrote a newsletter Flash 99% Bad. The information is just a true today. Solutions:
2. No text on page - Often what appears to the human eye to be text is an image that is completely unreadable to the search engine. Here are two examples: This is headline sized text
The first one is actual text, the second one is merely an image representing text. The only way to be certain whether words are text or an image is to look at the html code behind the page. The search engines know what to do with text and cannot index the image, even if it represents your most important keyword. I have fielded several phone calls from panicked marketing managers when their traffic plummeted after a web redesign. Images representing text, especially in a link or navigation, are frequently the culprit. Solution: Change the text images to actual text. 3. Image links - Even more important is when your links use an image, and even worse is when the images are driven by javascript and are not typically followed by the search engine robot. Here is one example from a screen shot showing a javascript driven navigation system:
When you place your cursor over the image another dept of choices appears. In general the search engines cannot follow these links and may not include other pages in your site. Solutions:
4. Content management driven websites - These sites are easy to identify. They use a ? in the url. Most manufacturer websites are under 100 pages and a content management system is overkill and hurts your rankings in the search engines for many reasons. If you have 1,000's of products, you can use a content management system for your products, and have your top 20 pages or more be straight html pages. I like Dreamweaver and here is a newsletter we did on making your website easy to maintain: What do I like?Scroll down to see a simple and effective website - Garaventa. It is not the most beautiful site, and it is very functional and search engine friendly. Garaventa's product line is immediately obvious and getting to their design information is easy. If I were cranking out specs every day, I would come here and know I could easily get my job done. Without being unfriendly to human users, the Garaventa site is loaded with text the search engines can index and return for key word requests. The Garaventa site is an update to our WebFormat™ proposal done almost 8 years ago. Further down is a screen shot of the CMI Waterfront Solutions. A much different appearing site, CMI achieves excellent visibility to the search engines. The words are all text, and all the links are text. These guidelines are not intended to restrict design, but rather encourage to include very vital search engine optimization requirements into your overall design strategy.
|
