Segment Your Web Site for SEO
A major part of search engine optimization is making sure that all of the pages on your web site are easily accessible by both humans and search engines. Since each page on a web site can be indexed you can also optimize each page for searchers and search engines.
To optimize your site for search engines consider that they use search engine robots to find and index a site. These robots, also called spiders, continually look for content on the web that needs to be indexed. Once they find something these robots will follow the hyperlinks to each web page. This is called “crawling” a site. When the robot arrives on a page it reads through the content and adds it to the index. Because robots do this for every page and this is a way your site pages get added to search engine results it is important to have navigational site structure that is friendly to the robots.
Additionally the search engines will only rank pages that are perceived as important. That’s why it is necessary to create content hierarchy in your navigational structure – your most important pages should be at the top of your site structure. Whichever page is at the top, usually your home page, generally attracts the most links. Often search engine robots stop searching after 3 clicks from the homepage. That’s why it’s important to decide on a hierarchy for your site’s pages.
This leads to categorization. If you want to organize your content in a natural way you should create categories for all of your site’s content. Then link those categories to your homepage. This helps create more key phrases to link to which can help you attract a wider audience for searches.
Keep in mind that search engine robots only follow html links. This means that any links using Flash, JavaScript, dropdown menus or submit buttons don’t get picked up by them and therefore don’t get indexed. Besides that html links are a better choice because the anchor text can describe the destination page for human visitors to see.
Finally, create a sitemap. A sitemap is basically works like an index, listing links to all the pages on your web site. If you link a sitemap to your home page robots have easy access to all your web site’s pages. Be aware though that robots generally follow less than 100 links from one page. If you have more pages than that consider creating a multi-page sitemap.
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Indexability | seowhitehats | June 20, 2008
