You won't find a webmaster who doesn't want to have more visitors.
The success of any website is measured by how popular it is. In some
cases, having more traffic is even more important than making money.
Web
search is a huge source of web traffic so naturally Search Engine
Optimization (also known as SEO) is one of the most important things any
webmaster should understand. SEO is about designing a website in such
an optimized way that will allow search engines to better understand its
content, index its pages and give them higher search result rankings so
to deliver more web visitors to the website. SEO has become a massive
industry by itself. It is constantly evolving as search engines evolve
and there is a huge list of variables to consider. In this article we
will address just a couple of the simplest yet critical issues related
to website design.
Search engines use 'web crawlers' to scan and
index each website. These web crawlers are essentially computers that
have been programmed to read and save the content of each web page so
the search engines can analyze their content and display them in their
search results accordingly. Therefore, in order to appear on search
engines your web pages must be visible to these web crawlers. Not all
web pages are visible to web crawlers.
Flash & Javascript
Websites
that are built in Flash or using javascript are very difficult if not
impossible for web crawlers to read because the contents are encoded in a
way that they are not visible in the web page's HTML source code.
If
you are running an online shop or an online directory where you have a
database of product listings and you want them to appear on search
engines so they will attract more people to your website, then you must
make sure the listings are not encoded using Flash or Javascript.
If
you have a search system on your own website that lets people search
the listings in your database, you may also want to avoid using
javascript or Flash for the search results page and make sure the result
listings will link to each product's own dedicated page.
Dedicated Static URL
If
you are not doing this already then it is highly recommended to give
each product or listing page its own dedicated static URL. By giving
each item its own dedicated page, you can create a sitemap that contains all the pages on the site and help web crawlers index every listing you have.
Dawson is a member of Lacartes.com - an online community where friends can share photos, videos, reviews and more. He regularly writes about businesses, e-commerce, seo and internet marketing.
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