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Posted: September 29 2005 at 7:11am | IP Logged

Spider Friendly Pages

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First off what is spider friendly navigation? Basically it is how easily search engines can read your website. This ultimately depends on the search engine that is reading your site. Some have the patience to dig deep into your site and promise to follow every link. Others may get bored before they finish indexing a whole page. Carefully organize your page content and Web site to ensure that spiders index the whole thing - not just bits and pieces. Here are some tips that will help you to do this:

1. Use Keywords/phrases that best describe the target page.
2. Avoid using image maps, if needed make sure to add text links at the bottom of all pages.
3. Do not use long text; limit 40-50 characters in a text link
4. Avoid using JavaScript links
5. Create text links and use a common navigational menu for all pages
6. For best results try to limit the number of links per page to 20. (Only a recommendation)
7. Include a site map if you have more than 20 pages.
8. If you are using flash navigation, always have text links as a supplement to the flash
9. Try to use keyword phrases in the HTML and image file names
10. Keep your file names hyphenated (e.g. use this-page.html instead of thispage.html)
    

1. Make sure your website is completely finished, spell checked, online and all links are working before submitting to Search Engines'.
2. Try to include .robots.txt. to prevent spiders from crawling certain directories. (For more info, visit www.robotstxt.org)
3. If the site was designed in something other than HTML, make sure there is some static content for the spider to read.
4. Try and get on DMOZ if you are not already there.
5. Read each search engines. guidelines and follow them closely.
6. Use meta tags in all places
7. For getting proper keywords that are commonly used visit:
   a) http://www.wordtracker.com
   b) http://inventory.goto.com/searchinventory/suggestion/
   c) https://adwords.google.com/select/m...=KeywordSandbox
8. For checking keyword density use the following sites:
   a) http://www.keyworddensity.com/
   b) http://www.ranks.nl
9. When using frames, make sure to include keyword rich content between the <noframe> </noframe> tags, on the main frameset page.
10. Keep all content in root directory if possible.
11. Make sure your home page can load within 8-10 seconds on a 56k modem
12. Try to use CSS data as an external file and call it using <link> tag
13. Optimize your images and keep the page size low
14. Update your more important pages at a regular interval
15. Check your site for broken links periodically

1. Avoid strange color combinations, as this can make it hard to read for a viewer
2. Text that is too small to read will also cause the reader to leave
3. Unrelated Advertisements will distract viewers
4. Hidden text, which is text the same color as the background
5. Submitting your site to FFA sites
6. Duplicate pages, doorway pages and cloaked pages
7. Re-direction from the homepage to another
8. Automated submission to search engines
9. Submitting to search engines more than once a month
10. Use of <meta refresh> tag in HTML page header
11. Using trademarks or company names other than yours in Meta tags.
12. Instance of 5 or 6 keywords being repeated in one row

Posted: October 14 2005 at 1:51pm | IP Logged

Techniner

Nice forum you guys have here. I want to learn Web design for my own page, and am willing to learn it from html up, but in the interim I still need a webpage, and want to know specifically: many sources and forums say that Frontpage is bulky and uncomfortable code, pushing spiderability and search ratings down.

Sure enough, a online verification of the html of a recent page had over 320 errors. And a virgin, unused template I scanned, was even worse.

Are there any templates that at least start clean and attractive? Dreamweaver? Go-daddy sitebuilder? Others?

Posted: November 09 2005 at 1:48am | IP Logged

can you please tell us all what vi is?

many thanks

Posted: January 26 2006 at 7:42pm | IP Logged

Hi,

New here, first post.

I was reading what you said in the first post, Techniner. Do you have a recommendation for finding out how search engine-friendly a site is that wasn't built by the owner/promoter? 

Doing all the linking I can do, and my metas look good, but page 5 of Google just doesn't get it, ya know?

1 more thing, where can one get a "robot.txt" and is it simply a copy/paste install or would it need to be uploaded separately?

Thank you for any suggestions you can offer.

Posted: February 10 2006 at 4:16am | IP Logged

great article . but still this article skips lot of concepts in Search engines  optimisation for example   " link exchange "

Posted: September 14 2006 at 9:55pm | IP Logged

Hello techniner,

Your Information is always helpful.Thanks.

[SNIP]

Please use the signature for your links and do not double post your link like that.

Thank you.

Posted: December 05 2006 at 7:07am | IP Logged

Hi all,

I beat myself up for four days to build the best darn links page on the planet. I now want to set it free.

It is located at http://www.debuggler.com/index-11.html.

Feel free to steal it.

The Debuggler

Posted: November 08 2007 at 5:37pm | IP Logged

eBrain wrote: What's the latest opinion of using commonly misspelled words in the keywords meta tags? Will this hurt with the engines or help? Thanks for your advice...

eBrain hi. The absolutely latest on this is that Google automatically corrects it and serves results normally though the misspelled imbalance can work in your favour with some keywords. Google checks to see if mispelled frequency indicates a deliberate attempt to capitalise on searchers mistakes and then penalises the site.