The Importance Of A Search Engine Friendly Site

When you decide to create a website, one of the most important things you will want is for the site to look attractive. No one wants an unattractive site, as this is a projection of your corporate image.

Unfortunately this extreme focus on having a beautiful site can be in conflict with one important thing – that your site should be search engine friendly. It is crucial to remember that search engines are blind to how aesthetically pleasing your website is, they are only focused on the content and internal structure of your site.

Here are some ideas whilst you are busy with your website designing to help ensure your site will be search engine friendly:

First of all, make sure that your whole website is not made up of Flash technology. Although Flash is very attractive and appealing to a lot of people, the search engines will not be able to ‘read’ your site. In addition to ensuring your whole site is not Flash based, you must make sure it is not run on purely Javascript either. If you do this, you will make it difficult for the search engines to follow the links on your site. In turn you will not be indexed properly.

Next you must ensure that your site had individual and descriptive META tags for all the pages. The most important tags are the TITLE tags and the DESCRIPTIVE tags. These tags will describe the content on each page on an individual basis. Any qualified website designer will know this.

It is vitally important that your site has search engine friendly URLs. Some websites are built using software that will generate pages with scripting languages such as PHP or a semi-automated tool. These software packages are fantastic for creating websites quickly, but unfortunately the URLs that they generate can be extremely unreadable for human navigation. For an example, instead of your page about safari packages for Africa having an internet address of http://www.yourtravelsite.com/safari-packages-to-africal.html, it might say http://www.yourtravelsite.com/index.php?com-category=2&id=4. Although search engines are able to read these links, the site will do much better with a humanly readable link. It is also easier attracting visitors with links that will describe the exact page they will be visiting.

These are only a few simple tips to ensure your website is designed in a search engine friendly manner. Ensure that you discuss these with your web developer.