Creating a "Clean" Website

Many web design companies swill tell you that they create search engine friendly websites. When you talk to SEO companies and SEO professionals, they will be quick to remind you that you should have a search engine friendly websites. What exactly is a search engine friendly website?

The key to creating a search engine friendly website is keeping it clean and simple! The basic factors you should be taking into consideration when attempting to that make your website into a search engine friendly website include your URL structure, coding, tax, script and text. Each one of these factors may seem like a small thing, but when you add them up you can create a website that is highly search engine friendly. That means it is easily crawled indexed, and categorized as relevant to your niche by the search engine spiders.

URL structure is crucial for making your website into a search engine friendly website. It is essential that you be consistent and use correct URLs throughout your site. To not do this is to lose big points.

The coding of your website should follow all accepted standards. Poor coding standards can and will make your website unfriendly to search engines which puts you behind the 8 ball right away. Tags are important to search engines and visible results – what your visitors see. Make sure you take advantage of tagging at every opportunity. What your users see does make your website search engine friendly to a degree, but a lot of it has to do with the codes at the backend which matter to the search engines. You cannot neglect either.

Your website should above all be XHTML compliant. Iy cannot be said any plainer than you need to have XHTML validation done to check for errors.  All errors should be rectified at the earliest possible time possible. An XHTML validation service can help you stay on top of this. When you design a website, XHTML errors often pop up, so having it checked and fixed will help your website be much more search engine friendly. Include both XML sitemap for search engines and a regular HTML sitemap for the users. It is easy to do and makes all the difference in the world.

Your websites should avoid Flash, Frames andJava script as much as possible as search engines have problems with crawling websites with frames, don’t like Java Script and can’t read Flash – just the text around it. It looks nice, but it is wasted when it comes to getting your site crawled.

Include as much text as possible on your home page and minimize the use of images. When you need to use images, use them as sparingly as possible. Include appropriate names for the images as well as Alt text. Tagging your images with the same format will help you find them later as well. Again, keep it clean and simple!

Keep the web pages short so they load fast. Pages that lag are penalized and they don’t make visitors too happy either. Make sure that all of the links are active; broken links and 404 errors will affect your website’s ranking and can irritate online users who will leave your site due to page cannot be found error messages. Once you get visitors to your site, you need to keep them!

Avoid drop down menus if possible. Search engine spiders find it difficult to drill down the dropdown menus used for your website’s navigation. Use regular static menus for website navigation instead! You should never have more than four clicks to reach any main page on your site. Also use ’breadcrumb links’ to help navigation issues. These are simple installations that make the spiders and visitors happy.

Finally, choose a reliable hosting provider so that your website has the highest uptime possible, and add fresh content often so Google will continue to return and re-index your website. In order to remain relevant, you need to remain up and running and active.