There isn’t much point in building a website unless you have visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, etc. Consequently, by designing a site which is search engine friendly, you will be able to rank in the search engines and obtain more visitors easily.
Major search engines employ programs called crawlers or robots in order to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to index your site more easily, you should try to avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only cause confusion for search engine robots and they might even abandon your site due to it. Further, frames tend to make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, and complicated scripts.
Try not to present information which is too important in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your ranking on the search engines will be dramatically affected.
Try to use your meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots will know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not they should index it. Through the use of meta tags, you will be making the search engine robot’s job more easy so they will crawl and index your site on a more frequent basis.
Stop using wrong HTML tags such as to style your page. Try to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead as they will be more effective and efficient. Through the use of CSS, you will be able to eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages load faster whilst remaining more light.
Michael Beattie is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.