Making your website search engine friendly
Many people wonder why they can’t find their web pages even when they search for the items that appear on their page. Most of the time, that is because they created a site that is not search engine friendly.
This article identifies the things you need to do in order to create a website that is search engine friendly.
1. Add ALT text to your images and videos
Fact: search engines can only read text. They can’t hear audio and they can’t see videos. They can only read text.
What does that mean? That means that if you have a video or audio file on your site, you need to provide text so that search engines know what it is. How you do that is by providing “alt” text for your video or image. If you only learn one thing about HTML code, you should learn what “alt” text is. For those of you who don’t know, images are put into a web page using HTML code like the following:
<img src=”dogs_fighting.jpg” alt=”Picture of two dogs fighting”>
Notice the “alt” part in the example HTML code above. Here, I described the image as a picture of a two dogs fighting. You will of course replace that text with a brief description of what your image shows. Even though search engines can’t actually see your picture, they can read your “alt” text and will include that in their index for your web page.
You should also include additional text to describe any videos or flash files you have.
In addition to making your site more search-engine friendly, this also will make your website more accessible for blind and other visually impaired visitors.
Don’t ignore this step. You will hurt your search ranking if you do not include text for your images.
2. Validate your HTML code
When you validate your HTML code, you are making sure that there are no errors with the code itself. If something major is wrong with your code, you would generally discover that on your own. But sometimes you might have small issues with your code that you didn’t realize. Whether or not you actually touch the code yourself, you are smart to run the final code through HTML and CSS validators. These validators might tell you, for example, that you are missing a “/>” sign that is causing an error with your page. If even one character is out of place in your code, it could be a huge problem, so you do not want to ignore this step. I hope to create an article providing more details on HTML validation soon.
Your HTML code does not need to be error-free, but it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine’s database. The errors may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site’s content. As a result, the search engine may ignore that text, and your web page will not be shown in its results page.
3. Create separate title tags for each page
Many search engines give additional importance to the text appearing in the HTML <TITLE> tag for your page. This is not the title that you see in the body of your web page. It is the part of the HTML code that the browser uses to display in the title bar of the browser window. The search engines use that tag as part of its formula to determine what your page is about.
The title tag should be different for each page on your site, rather than using your site name in the title tag of every page on their website. You should only put the site name in the title tag of their home page, and give the appropriate title for the rest of your pages. For example, for this page, the title tag should be “How to create a search friendly website.” Your title tag does not need to be the same as the title listed at the top of your page. Again using this page as an example, you could have the title tag be “Tips for a search engine friendly website.” If you still want the name of your website on every title tag, place it at the end of your title for the sub-pages on your site, for example, “How to create a search friendly website – SiteForStarters.”
4. Include HTML navigation links on your website
Search engines can’t figure out the links embedded in Flash files or JavaScript code, and your site is at a real disadvantage if you completely rely on those thinks rather than straight HTML links. Since search engines do not understand JavaScript, and if you only use Java-Script links, the search engines will not able to find the other pages on your website.
The same is true for websites that rely only on links embedded in Flash files.
You don’t need to get rid of all JavaScript code or Flash files from your website, but you need to give search engines and visitors without JavaScript-enabled or Flash players to visit all the pages of your site. Put simple HTML links on your web page linking to the other pages in addition to the cool videos and flash files.
You should also add a site map to your website and link to that site map from your main page so that search engines and people who don’t have JavaScript or Flash facilities can find their way around your site.
5. Check for content duplication
If you use a blogging service, blogging software or some other content management system (CMS), you should watch out for duplicate content on your website.
Duplicate content occurs when pages on your website are identical to other pages on your site. You probably won’t have that problem if you use a web editor, but some of the automated services mentioned earlier create alternate routes to the same article. For example, a content management system or blogging software may duplicate the same article you wrote under two different URLs, such as www.example.com/stories/ghosts.html and www.example.com/20010/11/06/ghosts.html. These services sometimes also add a session id to the URL for each visitor, meaning that each person visiting your site will be accessing through a completely different URL address. For example, if Bob and Sally both go to the same example.com page, he might be visiting a URL address of www.example.com/1 and she might be visiting www.example.com/2 for the same exact page.
This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. As I mentioned in my article on How to improve your Google search engine ranking. Google and other search engines basically give you a ranking based on the number of links pointing to your page to determine how important your web page is. If you have identical content appearing on two different pages on your website, some sites will link to one page while others will link to the other page. The end result is that it will split your ranking in half for the page.
Your software or service should have a way to solve that problem. You may need to search around for an answer or ask someone involved with the service. It is generally a simple fix, but you just need to find out what that fix is.
6. Eliminate hidden text
Hidden text is text that is included in the main body of your web page but is not actually displayed on the screen when people see your page. Back in the day, some people would use such text to add keywords to a web page to influence search engine results. Search engines figured that out and now will not show pages which they think contain hidden text.
Not that you would do such a thing, but it is possible that you have hidden text on your site and don’t know it. If that is the case, you might be penalized by the search engines. You should also be aware that your site may also contain hidden text if you use a free web host.
Conclusion
Following these steps will not place you at the top of the list for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. However, if you do not follow these steps, you will HURT your chances to be ranked highly. If you want to have a successful site, you need to follow these steps. Period.
