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Step 3 - Getting Your Website Ready
Before starting your web marketing campaign there are several key factors you must consider prior to even selecting the first keywords. You need to confirm your website's readiness in terms of overall structure and navigation. Your web marketing efforts have to begin with an easily navigable and logically laid out website structure.
The purpose of any site preparation is to get your website ready for the search engines and your visitors. Although it may seem these two goals entail different tasks, what's good for the search engines is also good for your visitors.
Pay attention to your users' experience, get your friends or colleagues to test drive the site and ask for their feedback. A great user experience will ensure the hard work you put into your site to attain a top ranking will pay off in higher page views and better conversion.
The major search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are "crawler based" This means they regularly visit your site and "import" your newly created pages and any updates into their index. Ensure that nothing restricts the search engines from discovering every page on your site that you want your visitors to find on the engines. Search engines follow links from your home page to every other page on your site, you need to create an functional linking structure.
What should you watch for?
Each of these key elements below can have a substantial effect on your overall search optimization goals and search engine ranking so please pay careful attention.
Internal link navigation based on static text links works best as internal linking with keywords embedded in anchor text create a powerful combination of page relevancy.
Frames should be avoided wherever possible otherwise it will stop search engines in tracks and your web pages will be left out of their search engine index.
Flash should be limited to important concept illustrations or special affects, but don't build a flash only website if you want to achieve high search engine ranking.
Images should be only used for illustrations and not for navigation or embedded text. Search engines can't read text embedded in image objects.
Dynamic content and e-commerce website should ensure their product and category page URLs are not simply a number or some cryptic code, but a well formed URL re-written code.
Dynamic navigation using JavaScript is a big no-no, but DHTML based menu systems are ok.
Page size and loading speed is not as much of a concern as it used to be in the early days of the Internet, but overloading your pages with heavy graphics or flash is still not a good idea. Think of your users and their time. If you notice your site's bounce rate is very high it may be due to visitors getting impatient and leave before the pages load.
HTML code errors are most often not seen by your visitors and the search engines are very forgiving when it comes to sloppy source code, but you should aim for nearly perfectly validated HTML pages. You can use many freely available online and desktop tools to help you validate your HTML pages. Here is the most popular HTML code validator Validator.w3.org.
The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is strongly recommended to substantially reduce the size of your HTML pages. Wherever possible use CSS classes to make your HTML source code more readable and to reduce the ratio between text and HTML codes.
Broken links to pages and images are not only embarrassing, but also can send a signal to the search engines about the quality of your website. Use a freely available link checker called Xenu to check your links regularly.
Image maps are not search engine friendly. Search engines generally can't follow links associated with parts of an image. An image map designates different sections of an image as clickable links and allows one image to serve as a hyperlink to target multiple URLs. Keep in mind the search engines are blind when it comes to image maps.
Add a site map to your site once your main pages are uploaded. This should be one of the last steps in the page optimization process, but we decided to mention it here as it uniquely relates to usability and search engine friendly web design. A site map is a catalog of important links on a designated page. The link to each page ideally will have descriptive text. The number of links on a site map should not exceed 50 on a single page. If your site has more than 50 pages, you need to create additional site map pages within a new category.
Add a site search tool to your website. Installing a site search tool on your website is great way to increase your site's usability and at the same time you can get into the minds of your visitors by seeing what they are searching for. The search keywords used in a site search could also be a warning sign that certain information on your site is not easily accessible.
Reliable web hosting is a key essential for well indexed website. If your site is down for even one day, you can expect the search engine to remove some of your page and in some cases the complete website. We can recommend two hosing companies we have used for years now. For Windows hosting please check out Alentus.com and for Linux based hosting we recommend Dreamhost.com.
Conclusion
Site preparation and search engine friendly website design can not become an after thought in your website promotion campaign. Seemingly minor obstacles for search engine spiders to access your website's web pages can turn into major headaches later if they are not addressed properly. Search engines can only rank web pages that make it into their index. It's your job, as a webmaster to ensure every web page that is important to your site gets crawled by the search engines. This may mean website re-design for established websites with low search engine traffic.
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