CREATE A SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY WEBSITE

Follow the mentioned points to make search engine friendly websites

1.       Search engine’s software can read only text but not the text that you embed in an image or text that you place inside a flash file or those that appear in videos. Text mean the actual text that you can see in the websites-plain, unadulterated, ordinary text. However it’s true that some search engines have the rudimentary ability to scan a Flash file, you cannot suppose that this ability is sophisticated enough to obtain all the information you want to have. But I am in doubt that Google can do this and even then only to extract straightforward links embedded in the file and I am sure that no other search engine can see the image file or video file and determine the text it contains. However this doesn’t mean that you cannot create a photo album site, flash game site or a video site that ranks in the search engine results page. You can still place your pictures, flash, videos on your site but you must write content for each of these non-test elements to describe them.

For sample:

If you are going to place any image in your website then you should describe each picture in the “alt” text for the image. The following are the codes:

<img src="name-of-image.jpg" alt="this is sample text">

Notice the “alt” part in the example HTML code above. Here, I have described the image as “this is sample text”, you should of course replace that text with a brief description of what your image really shows. So that the search engine can easily rank your website if someone searches the content matching with your text. Likewise for the flash and videos files you should add some description that describes your videos and flash well. When designing your website, make your website more accessible for blind and other visually impaired visitors and you will also reap the side benefit of making your site more search engine friendly.

2.       The other thing you have to do is validate your HTML codes in your website. I should be sure that the HTML code does not have any errors. So I suggest you to use WYSIWYG web editor like Dreamweaver, Nvu or KompoZer, such codes are usually generated behind the scenes by the editor as you type your text. Whether you write your HTML code by hand or use a WYSIWYG web editor, it is a good idea to always run the final code through HTML and CSS validators. Search engine don’t care whether your codes are correct or not, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out the portion for indexing. Some portion of your web page may be included if some errors are there in codes. When the errors are undetectable in a web browser, may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site's content. As a result, the search engine may ignore that text, and your web page will not be shown in its results page.

3. Most Relevant Title Tags

Additional weightage is given to the text appearing in the HTML <TITILE> by many search engines                so, it is wise to create the most relevant title tags.

Note: This is not the title that you see in the body of your webpage. Rather it is the non-visible text in the HTML code that the browser uses to display in the title tag to something meaningful. Instead, they just put their site name in the title tag of every page on their website. They should, instead, put the site name only in the title tag of their home page, and place a meaningful title on each individual page of their site. For example, on a page that describes a product "Widget XYZ", the title tag should read "Widget XYZ Product Features" or something like that. If you feel that the name of your website is important to have on every title tag, place it at the end of your title for the sub-pages on your site, for example, "Widget XYZ Features - XYZ Company".

4. Place Straight HTML navigation Links On Your Website

Google is said to understand links embedded in Flash files. But until search engine robot technology improves so that all search engines can easily figure out the links embedded in Flash files or JavaScript code, any website totally reliant on such links is surely at a disadvantage compared to websites that use straightforward HTML links. Again, this is not a call to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You do not have to ditch all JavaScript code or Flash files from your website. Instead, what you need is to provide a way for search engines (and visitors who do not have JavaScript-enabled or Flash players) to visit all the pages of your site. Put simple HTML links on your web page linking to the other pages in addition to your state-of-the-art gadgets.

You should also add a site map to your website and link to that site map from your main page. That way, search engines and human visitors who don't have JavaScript or Flash facilities can find their way around your site.

3.       Elimination of Duplication Of Your Website Content.

           Content Management System (CMS), blogging service, blogging software are the systems that usually don’t allow the duplication of the content in your website. By duplicate content, I mean pages on your website that are identical to other pages on your site. If you manually create your website using a web editor, this will probably never happen. The problem with duplicate content on your own site is link dilution. Your Search Engine Ranking on Google, Google and other search engines take into account the number of links pointing to your page to determine how important your web page is. If you have identical content appearing on two different pages on your website, some sites will link to one page while others will link to the alternate page. The result is that neither of those pages will be regarded as very important in the search engine's index since you have effectively halved the links pointing to your article. Solutions like blocking out alternative URLs from search engines using a robots.txt file may seem like a possible solution, but they do not solve the problem of link dilution.

6. Elimination Of Hidden Text

     To use hidden text is counterproductive nowadays. By hidden text, I mean text that is included in the main body of your web page but is not actually displayed on the screen when visitors view your page in a browser. In old days some webmaster used the hidden text to add keywords in their webpage to attract search engine results. But nowadays search engines deals with these issues by not showing the pages that it thinks contain hidden text. I inadvertently discovered that sometimes search engines wrongly penalize sites even if the hidden text was innocuous - for example, text that only showed for people using a particular browser to tell them that they may not be able to access certain features of the website due to deficiencies in the browser. Free web host may also create a hidden text on its pages without your knowledge so, personally suggest not to use the free web host though it is free of cost. Such web host can disappear overnight so it is wiser not to use free webhost.

So guys creating search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you ill get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere nears the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query. The tips in this article are the pre-requisites for any website aspiring the top positions in Google, Yahoo, and the other engines.