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- Clear menus
- Focused content
- Logical organization
- Links to relevant material.
- Active testing and feedback
- Descriptive Metas
- Clean code
When we are asked to improve site visibility, these are the points we try to address.
Make your menus stand out - People don't like to read. If they arrive at your site with a topic in mind, they want clearly defined signposts to jump out at them. Unless you want to develop a wiki interface, don't scatter your important links in a block of text. Don't bury primary links on a back page. Back up javascript with hard coded links.
Focus your ideas - Group your concepts, with obvious links to the subtopics. If you are constructing a home page with multiple topics, leave enough white space between the separate areas of content to define what is being grouped.
Prioritize your content - Keep main topics one click down. Limit sub topics to no more than 3 links deep. Avoid circular menus with multiple pages whose links only go one page forward or one step back. Provide an easy way to return to the home page. Don't turn the site exploration into a treasure hunt.
Provide resources and back-up to your assertions. If customers decide the material is interesting, they may want to know more in depth.
Arrange for active testing of your pages. You may think the information on your page is clearly stated, but does the customer see it?
Help search engines determine your page relevancy to a search criteria.
- Provide keyword and description metas - think of common synonyms and related concepts rather than repeating the same key word multiple times, anticipate common spelling errors in search criteria
- Make keywords, descriptions and page titles reflect page content.
- Place site content excerpts and lead-ins on the index page. Mission statements do not belong on the index page.
- Because inbound links count heavily in your site's relevancy profile, look for ways to offer content other sites might find useful.
- Make sure that your reciprocal links have original content with a valid relationship to your own. Vast collections of links that don't relate to your site content are just a form of spam.
In general, don't use frame pages - Frames are a single page (call it a) subdivided into two or more sections, where the menu (m) section retrieves content "framed" in the content (c) section of the page. Search engines record the link of the frame (a), but the framed content (c) just becomes part of the frame page, depriving search engines of the links to pages rotated into the "content" (c) part of the frame. In instances where sites wish to obscure the path to a page, a frame may make link to the actual content more difficult to find.
Don't use html filled with proprietary tags - The pages load poorly and may cause display problems. In other words, don't paste text formatted in Microsoft Word into Content Management system text editors.
Don't use images as text - Search engines can't read "text" buried in images, so any content other than the title is lost. Google can translate PDFs into an html format, but visitors to your site may not bother, even if they have Adobe reader. Any extra steps to retrieve content discourages customers.
If you use Flash make sure your site requires it. - When possible, incorporate text in your Flash file. If the Flash movie incorporates music or heavy graphics, it can load slowly. Consider breaking out audio into a separate file, which can download after the rest of the page content has resolved.. Some search engines frankly state they avoid sites heavy in flash, and refuse to index them.
If you can't get your site to come up in the search results, we will look to see which of these key aspects you are missing.