Technical pitfalls and solutions

Get certain technical things wrong and your website will be unreadable by search engines and your business will be missing out on free advertising to a global audience.

There’s a huge amount of advice and in books, websites and blogs out there but here are some of the key technical pitfalls and solutions that you should bear in mind to ensure your website is properly readable by search engines:

Pitfalls

Solutions

Websites setup using Frames or IFrames – Searchbots can’t find them easily and can’t index your full website missing out important pages.

Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to layout your web pages.

Navigation using Java, JavaScript or Macromedia Flash – Searchbots can’t follow these links easily and probably won’t find other pages within your website.

Again CSS or simple text link navigation can be followed easily by Searchbots and can offer the similar levels of functionality in terms of, for example, drop-down menus etc

Not having a unique <Title> and meta tags for each page.

It’s important to get in the habit of properly written <Title> and meta tags that describe your website. The <Title> tag is often used in search engine results so this must describe your website succinctly.

Having pages containing unecessary programming code – although your page might look fine when viewed through a browser - it could contain a lot of spurious code that make it more difficult for the Searchbots to ‘read’ the text of your website and follow links to other pages. For example a layout using mostly HTML tables will always generate excessive code and take longer to load for your users.

Always ensure that any code used for CSS and JavaScript is linked through an external file so it doesn’t clutter the raw code of your page. Also try to use CSS rather than HTML tables for laying out the page as this reduces the amount of programming code and makes the text easier to read for Searchbots.

HTML tables are useful in certain circumstances but should be avoided for the bulk of your content.

Although fixing some of the pitfalls retrospectively can be time-consuming, ‘Searchbot’ friendly pages are actually easier to create and manage long term as long you build this in to your website project from the outset.

This is a huge subject and way beyond the scope of this simple advice page. Please get in touch for a friendly discussion on how we can help: contact form.