SEO Speak: Search Engine Friendly

Many tools for running websites claim to the search engine friendly, but what actually is search engine friendly and what should you look for when buying new tools for your website?  Understanding what a search engine friendly website is can greatly aid your SEO work.

There are many elements which make a website search engine friendly including the below:

Readability/Crawlabilty

When a website crawler visits your website the search engine is looking for content that can be read and links that can be followed.  Having too much JavaScript on your page or a Flash based site will limit the amount of readable content and links that search engines can get from your site.  When working on the design of your website remember that java based menus don’t allow a search engine to crawl pages on your site so you need to consider a css based menu structure, which creates readable links for the search engines to follow.

Search Engines can’t read images either, so a search engine friendly web page will contain a mix of copy and images and not just lots of images – no matter how pretty this might look!

Search Engines need to be able to prove that your website is relevant to your keywords before you will be able to rank for them.  They also need to be able to reach all of the content on your site not just the homepage.

URLs

Does your website generate very long URLs such as www.yourcomany.com/index.php?catid=12343&prodid=4536625&showprod=42552 if so your website is not as friendly to search engines as it might be.  Having keywords in your URLs will not only help you when giving addresses out to your users but support the work you are doing on your keywords – look for website tools which will enable you to change your URLs from the above to www.yourcompany.com/duvetcovers/pinkduvetcover which is much easier to give out and contains references to duvet covers which enforces your website’s relevance to the keyword duvet cover.

Meta Information and Title Tags

This is something that comes up a lot for ecommerce websites.  When optimising your website you need to provide unique meta information and title tags for all the pages on your site.  A search engine friendly website tool will enable you to specify unique content for the title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags on every page and product shown on your site.

Google Webmaster Tools flags pages with duplicate meta descriptions and title tags as providing them and the other search engines with as much detailed information about each individual page as possible, stating that this can help each page perform better in the rankings.

I’ll talk more about Search Engine Friendly website tools soon.