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Design and Accessibility

August 31st, 2008 | Author: Michiel Van Kets

Many web designers are so focused on the design part of building a website, that they will unintentionally affect its search engine rankings. It is a total shame to create an attractive website that does not attract any visitors. There is no point to all that beauty if no one can find it. Here are some ordinary design mistakes that should be kept away from whenever possible.

Image Links
If your navigation menu consists of images to form the buttons instead of text, the search engine bots will be confused. It makes it difficult for search engines to spider and index your site. What if you do not have any other option than image links in the navigation bar? Add ALT text to the image links to give meaning to the image. Make sure that you have text links somewhere else on the page as well. The footer is a nice place to have a few more links.

Frames
When using frames in a site, the problem is that most search engines will only see the frame loader page and ignore the rest of the page within. If you do not have any choice but using frames, offer lead-in pages that are not placed in frames. This means that you can put all of your beautiful frame-based pages in other locations.

Splash Intro Pages
Beautiful intro’s or entry pages, often using flash animation, are impressive to human visitors, even though many of them will ‘skip the intro’ quickly to get to where they want to be. For search engines, however, such a introduction is not impressive at all. The spiders will think that this is the index page and will not find it useful at all. Often, the only text on these intro pages is “skip intro”, which does not say much about the rest of the site.

In order to get the top rankings in the SERPs, your will have to help the search engines a little bit. Their spiders will have to find your site, and be able to navigate the site, and read all of your content, before they can rank it. Some graphic elements will affect the accessibility of your website and are better avoided. Surely it does look nice, but who is there to see it if your site does not attract any visitors?

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Posted in search engine optimization, webdesign |

Tags: design, graphics, seo, spiders | No Comments »

5 ways to get Indexed by the Search Engines

August 22nd, 2008 | Author: Michiel Van Kets

To start with, you need to let search engines come across your website. Search engines use a computer program called Spiders to find new websites. As soon as spiders find your website, they will put it in their databases. However, for brand new websites, it is hard to get found by search engines.

What a lot of webmasters do is to submit their sites to Google and Yahoo by hand, but there really is no need to do that. Here are 5 ideas to get your website indexed by search engines fast:

Include a sitemap.xml file in your root directory. This xml file is like a list of the URLs of all pages of your website. This will help the spiders of the search engines with crawling your website. Once you have uploaded it to your root directory, you should set up an account at Google Webmaster Tools. Here you can submit the sitemap.
There are a few barricades that prevents spiders from reading the content of your site. Get rid of them. If your website is coded in flash or frames, it is hard for spiders to crawl your website. The spiders prefer languages as HTML or PHP. If spiders cannot crawl your website, they won’t be able to index it either and it will not appear in the SERPs
Submit your site to social bookmarking platforms. A good way to get your website detected by search engines is to let them naturally find it. A way to let this happen is to submit your site to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. Spiders generally visit these sites several times per day. If your site is listed on one or more of the bookmarking sites, chances are high that it will be found and indexed.
Get a link pointing to your site from a website with high PageRank (PR). Getting a high PR backlink to your site certainly helps successful indexing and it is also possible to get good organic rankings on search engines. Directory submissions are one of my preferred ways to get links pointing to a website. Chose directories with high PR and submit your website to them. Some of the popular directories such as Yahoo need payment before you get included, which could be well worth the money.
Write articles and submit to popular article directories. Article marketing is a popular way to get your site noticed by search engines, and it can also attract some traffic to your website. Write an interesting article and include a link in it pointing to your website. Then submit it to popular article directories as WebRaydian and ArticleCube. Spiders are known to visit article directories frequently and once they crawl your article, they will follow the link in it and find your website.

Getting your site crawled by search engine spiders is undeniably a necessity in order to have good rankings in the SERPs. Try some or all of the ideas above and get your site indexed quickly.

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Posted in manual submissions, search engine optimization |

Tags: indexing, search engines, spiders | No Comments »