Designing a website can be a daunting task if you’re new to the game and have little time to research the proper ways to develop a site that is both user and search engine friendly. After all, what good is a website if no one can find you? Below are some things to avoid if search engine traffic is a priority.
Frames are pages within a page. Search engine crawlers, spiders, or bots read a frameset as one page with very little content. Just because you can’t see the frames distinctly when viewing a page online doesn’t mean the search spider sees the site as a human does. If you want to see the site as a crawler does, right click on the main area of the page in question and view the source code of that page. You must avoid frames especially for main/home pages of a site.
Flash is a very cool and hip way to do a page as it can incorporate interactivity and entertainment into a site or page, but it has little value to a search crawler. But the fact is a search crawler cannot read flash page or component so all of that content and interlinking you worked so hard to develop earns you nothing in terms of search value. Your viewers may love your site, but you’re unlikely to attract new viewers without the help of the search engines. One caveat: it’s okay to mix in some Flash, but stay away from pure Flash for your website if your goal is to attract the masses.

Search crawlers can’t execute lines of code therefore they won’t be able to navigate your site if you implement a lot of Java script to guide users. The purpose of a crawler is to inventory a website to report back to the engine what it found. Once the search engine has a pretty good inventory of a site, it can mix that site in with the search engine results pages for a given keyword phrase. Try to make the crawler’s job as easy as possible by limiting the amount of scripting navigation per page. If you insist on using scripting for navigation, make sure you have some form of HTML navigation visible as well. At worst, have an HTML link on each page to an accurate site map for your site.

Most search engines will not list dynamic URLs in their results pages. Dynamic URLs are typically used for database driven sites or script based sites. The above paragraph outlines the reasoning behind avoiding scripts, and dynamic URLs are no different. If you must use dynamic URLs, try to have a main page that doesn’t so that the search engines can find you.
Search crawlers frequently get stuck within image maps and can’t accurately inventory your site. Stick with standard HTML navigation schemes if at all possible. When designing your site, keep in mind that it needs to be easy to navigate for users and search engine crawlers alike. A slick site is of little use if no one can find you especially a search engine crawler.

Meta Tags - They’re Back!!

In the beginning of search engine optimization, there were meta tags.

That beginning line of code on websites that began with and closed with was the perfect place to list all of the pertinent keywords related to your site. Search engines would then use this to help determine where to rank the page. Sadly, spammers quickly learned to abuse this useful piece of coding, and search engines began to ignore them.

The good news…. they’re back!

Many of the primary search engines are beginning to factor in meta tags once again, along with several other factors to help determine a page’s ranking. Thanks to new algorithms used for ranking, spammers are no longer able to manipulate their page’s ranking so easily.

So, how do I use meta tags exactly?

As mentioned, meta tags are those beginning lines of code between the open and close tags. Even though meta tags are invisible to web viewers, they contain important information about your website. “Keyword” tags are used to identify the relevant words and phrases that should lead Internet users to your site, and the “description” tags are used to further describe what your website content is about. With this in mind, here are five suggestions to follow when creating your meta tags:

1. Meta tags should be different for each of your website’s pages. You don’t have the exact same content on each of your pages, so it makes sense that each page’s meta tags should be different as well.

2. Your meta tags should focus on what information is really on your page. Don’t waste your time trying to fool the search engines.

3. Separate your keywords with a comma only - no spaces.

4. When deciding which keywords to put first, place the most relevant words at the start of the tag.

5. When writing your description tag, use complete sentences and include your most relevant keywords and phrases.

Some webmasters, thinking meta tags were dead, have erroneously removed them from their source code. Don’t make this same mistake! Thanks to new ranking algorithms countering spammers who’ve abused the meta tag system, meta tags have returned as an important piece of the search engine optimization puzzle.