Search engine friendly web development is the process of creating a web site with an end result being 100% search engine compliant. Every search engine friendly web site should include text links with a clean clear hierarchy for spider crawl ability, no broken links and correct HTML. Every web page is accessible from static, not dynamic links. A site map is very useful in search engine friendly web development but not necessary with our search engine friendly ecommerce solution - Mountain Commerce.
Mountain Commerce has complete, index compatibility with ALL major search engines.
It's essential to search engine friendly web development that your web pages be FREE from frames, DHTML, JavaScript and Flash which all halt spider activity within your web site. It's also key in search engine friendly web development to have both TITLE and ALT tags as accurate and descriptive as possible. ALT attributes of image tags help search engine spiders gather information about that specific graphic; spiders cannot read text contained in images.
Search engine friendly web development allows search engine spiders to freely crawl your web site without session ids for tracking individual behavior. Allowing such arguments (cookies/session ids) may result in incomplete indexing of your web site.
With search engine friendly web development comes clean URL strings. Search engine spiders can't decipher between URLs that look different but point to the same page. Having numerous URLs with the same content on each page can potentially throw your web site into the "Supplemental Results", an alternative Google index. The "supplemental results" are bad and want to be avoided at all costs. Once you are in the Google "sups", you will not appear in the main index for certain search phrases.
Search Engine Friendly Web Development Basic Principles:
- Avoid "cloaking", which presents different content to the search engines than that of the user.
- Avoid link schemes/link farms designed to increase PageRank. You could unknowingly be linking to other web site's that have been punished by Google.
- Avoid "black hat" tactics or tricks that are intended to improve search engine rankings. Ask yourself "Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Avoid unauthorized use of programs that send automatic queries to major search engines, which violate Google's Terms of Service.
Search Engine Friendly Web Development Quality Guidelines:
- Avoid multiple web pages, domains, and hostnames with substantially duplicate content.
- Avoid web pages that load with irrelevant content.
- Avoid "doorway" pages created solely for the purpose of deceiving search engines.
- Avoid automated queries from being sent to all major search engines.
- Avoid the black hat tactic of "cloaking" or sneaky redirects within your site.
- Always avoid hidden links or hidden text that search engines can see but the user cannot.
Search Engine Friendly Web Development Content Guidelines:
- Create content that is useful, keyword rich information.
- Write web pages that accurately and clearly describe your copy.
- Use keywords as anchor text that link to internal pages within the site.
- Enclose important web page headers in h1 - h5 tags.
- Make sure keyword density of keyword/keyword phrases is at an appropriate level.
When search engine friendly web development is done right, your web site will be Google's new best friend!!
