Search Engine Guide - Site LayoutSite Layout
Many webmasters overlook the impact site layout can have on rankings. We're concerned with how the site looks and feels for the visitor, but tend to overlook how it looks and feels to the search spiders. Fortunately many of the same factors that make site easy to navigate for visitors also makes it easy to navigate for spiders.
Internal Linking
Be SURE that your pages are linked to each other through a good menu system. EVERY page should be reachable by a text link that doesn't change and isn't generated "on the fly". If you have dynamic content, a site map is very useful. Be sure to include a text link to that site map on EVERY page.
Using the Heading Tags
Arrange your site pages in an orderly fashion. Remember your high school days when you had to outline a textbook chapter? Making your page easy on the spiders uses the same concept. Your site is about a particular topic, set of products, or ideas. Each page should logically address one part of the topic or idea, or one product or group of products.
The index page should be an overview of what the visitor, including the search spider visitor will find on this site.
The most important topic or product or idea title should come first on the page and have a larger heading tag size. Headings are ranked from 1 to 6 with heading 1 being the largest and heading 6 the smallest.
As you break down the topic into smaller "chunks" use smaller heading sizes. Thus the visitor as well as the spider would see something like this:
Vitamins - heading 1 followed by appropriate text copy
Family vitamins - heading 2 followed by appropriate text copy
Family vitamins with iron - heading 3 followed by appropriate text copy
Family vitamins without iron - heading 3 followed by appropriate text copy
Children's vitamins - heading 2 followed by appropriate text copyUsing Text Tags
Spiders tend to pay more attention to bold or italic text or other font attributes. These font attributes are a flag to the spiders that this word or phrase is important in determining what the site is all about. Try to write your page copy so it becomes logical to make keywords emphasized. This not only helps draw your reader's attention to a specific word or phrase, but also draws the spiders to the keywords used in that phrase.
Technical Issues
Be aware that spiders don't read Flash. Although Goggle and Yahoo are experimenting with special programs that WILL read text embedded in Flash, this is a "coming soon" technology for most search engines. If you use a flash menu - put a text based one at the bottom of your page to help the spiders.
Clean up your code! Sloppy code, unclosed and redundant tags, over use of tables, and poor HTML formatting will hurt your rankings. Spiders like nice, clean, easy to read code.
Make your java and CSS files external. The more "stuff" a spider has to go through to get to your content the worse you'll rank. Some spiders read a specific amount of code and then give up and move on. If you have java scripting and on page CSS definitions you could be forcing the spiders to go through a hundred lines or more before getting to what your site is all about. using external files for Java and CSS results in one or two lines of code rather than dozens or even hundreds.
Not only will the spiders read the page more easily, it will smaller and load quicker for your visitors.
For more information on coding for the engines, check out How to Fix the Bloated (CSS and JavaScript) Code that is Jacking Up Your SEO
Next up - Using Meta Tags