Search Engine Friendly Design

by Lid

More from Searchnomics 2007, Shashi Thakur, Member of Technical Staff, Google Inc., and Paul O’Brien, Marketing Director for Zvents discuss the things you should, and the things you should not worry about when it comes to search engine friendly design.

Stuff to worry about

Include unique, useful content, preferably HTML
Include relevant and organic links
Think accessibility – it needs to be easy to reach with a text based browser
Use alt tags
Take care with images, flash, frames, JavaScript
Think aesthetics
Make your pages “ bite size”
Check page rendering in different browsers
Don’t include too many advertisements
Good Titles are extremely important
Pages need to be easily reachable
Don’t bury the good stuff deep within the sites

Stuff you shouldn’t worry about (stuff that does not affect ranking)

Type of server (Apache vs. IIS)
File types: HTML, PHP, ASP, CFM
AdWords and AdSense

Links: The Good and the Bad

Encourage related sites to link to you by writing unique content
Avoid reciprocal links for the sake of a link
Avoid any type of link that you have to pay for
Avoid link exchanges (you know the sites, you give me a link, I’ll give you one back)
Avoid bad neighborhoods, that is, the shady areas of the Web

Ugly Links vs. Pretty Links

Ugly links are long and keyword less

Good looking links are short and keyword rich

Both of these sites talk about Independence day, which do you think makes more sense to search?

http://free.ed.gov/subjects.cfm?subject_id=257

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Independence_Day.shtml

Paul O’Brien suggests by tidying up your URL’s, you can increase your ranking in search results; he suggests getting to know Mod Rewrite.

Anchor text

When using anchor text (the text within your site that links to another page), make sure you use choose your words wisely. Give some meaning to the words, so when search engine bots look at them, it makes some sense:

Awful Anchor Text:

Using the word “here” as the anchor text in this sentence:

“You can read more about Searchnomics 2007 here”

Great Anchor Text

Using the words “Searchnomics 2007” as the anchor text in this sentence:

“Read more about Searchnomics 2007″

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