Even though you may have optimized your site for the search engines, that doesn’t mean that it’s search engine friendly. Search engine optimization is all about gaining high rankings in search engine results which, in turn, brings you more targeted traffic. Creating search engine friendly pages, on the other hand, is all about ensuring that your site and all of your optimization efforts can be easily and quickly navigated and indexed by the search engine robots or spiders. The following are tips for ensuring that your pages are search engine friendly:
- Avoid frames. Frames can cause problems for the search engines so avoid using them when possible.
- Clean code. Because the search engines look at the code behind your pages rather than the appearance of your pages, it’s important that you make sure that your code is clean and easy for the spider to read.
- Content. Make sure the spiders get to your main content first by positioning it before your images.
- Easy navigation. Spiders can have trouble navigating complicated navigation systems, such as those utilizing flash or pop-ups. It’s best to keep your navigation simple and easy.
- Graphics. Use graphics carefully. Keep them relevant to your content and avoid using too many. It’s best to keep a ratio of 70% text to 30% graphics. Also be sure to use the Alt tag for all of your images.
- Limit JavaScript. If you must use JavaScript for navigation purposes, use smaller scripts.
- Simple tables. When using tables in your page’s layout, avoid making them overly complex. Instead, keep them simple.
- Site map. Site maps help spiders find all of your important pages so make sure that your website has one.
Once your website is search engine friendly, you can then go about optimizing it to perform well. The following are some SEO tips to help you do just that:
- Choose your keywords carefully, making sure that you don’t target over broad keywords and that all of your targeted keywords are relevant to your content.
- Give your keywords a prominent position by using them near the beginning of the page, in the heading’ tag, in hyperlinks, and so on.
- Make sure your page title is accurate, descriptive and uses your targeted keywords.
- Make sure your page description in the META Description tag is accurate, descriptive and uses your targeted keywords.