Ensure Your Website Is Search Engine Friendly

By Mark Sceats

Your website must be search engine friendly or compatible.

Often sites are built in ways that may them difficult or impossible for search engines to “spider”. (Search engines use automated software robots to spider or follow the page links within web sites and interpret what the pages are about). If a search engine can’t spider your site then it won’t add it to its index – meaning your site won’t appear in search results.

It should be noted that the design aspects of a site with great user functionality often conflict with requirements conducive to achieving good rankings in search engines. The requirements of the two distinctive audiences (end-users, i.e. people) and search engine spiders (robots) are very different.

What may be beneficial for one audience can be detrimental to the other. For example, search engine spiders index text. They don’t index many of the other elements added to website pages by designers to enhance appeal and user functionality, such as graphical images and Flash.

The trick of course is to try and meet the requirements of both audiences – i.e. have a site that appeals to the primary audience (people) and yet is search engine friendly.

Whilst there is no doubt the most important audience to satisfy is people, the need for making the site search engine compatible should not be overlooked. More than 80% of Internet users rely on search engines and directories as their preferred method for locating web sites

Just because your site’s been built by a major web development company doesn’t necessarily mean this won’t apply to you.

US Fortune 100 companies spend millions developing web sites and yet a survey of websites belonging to US Fortune 100 companies found that 97% of them had some type of site architecture problem that might cause problems being found by search engines. The use of JavaScript, Flash, frames and some popular dynamic delivery systems may cause crawler-based search engines to miss indexing pages. (Survey by iProspect, May 2001)

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