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Professional Webdesign

Whether you are looking for a small easy to edit web site to promote your business, an online shopping cart with payment facilities, or something more custom, we can provide the whole package.

Accessibility Audits

Accessible web sites rank higher in Google, they are easier to maintain, they increase brand equity and they can be used more easily by the large group of people who surf the web with new technologies like mobile phones.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is the technique of optimising your website so that it is regularly indexed by search engines so that it displays your products and services in the search engine results. The ultimate goal is to be on the first page and without a search engine optimisation strategy your time and money could all be in vain.

In This Section

Ensuring Search Engines Find Your Website

One of the most essential aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your website are easily accessible by the search engines. All the pages within your site structure can be indexed. Every page of your site can be uniquely optimised for different products or services you offer for sale from your website.

There are things you can and cannot do with the process of providing search engines easy access to your web pages. Firstly it is important to be aware how the search engines find and index web pages.

Search engine Robots

Search engines employ "robots" (otherwise known as bots or spiders) to look for content on the web to be indexed. A robot, i.e. a computer program follows the hyperlinks (crawling) to reach the web pages. After arriving on a page it reads through the content and includes it within the search engines index and continues the process with all the pages. Having said this it becomes obvious as to why it is important to have a robot friendly navigational structure to get as many pages indexed as possible.

Navigational Structure

The navigational structure of your site should have a content hierarchy. Search engines only rank pages that are judged as important. It is essential to have important pages at the top of your site structure. The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site and therefore should be at the top of your site structure, usually attracting the most inbound links. The robots normally stop after the first three clicks from the homepage. It is important that you place the most important pages just a click away, and the rest accordingly.

How to link your pages

Search engine robots can follow only generic HTML href links. All Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons are useless when it comes to indexing your site. Links with query strings of two or more parameters are also ignored so watch out for this if yours is a dynamically generated website.

Even from an SEO perspective generic HTML text links are best because the anchor text can be used to describe the destination page. Image links, while acceptable, do not have the ability to search engine optimise the anchor text because the alt attribute is given less weight as anchor text.

Avoid canonical problems

Many websites are configured with errors causing duplicate or similar content pages to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures in their site causing same content to be indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use Google PageRank or a similar measure to establish which version of a URL is the canonical URL.

Webmasters should use consistent link structures in their sites, ensuring they pack the maximum amount of PageRank into the URLs they need indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index, it is best to end the link location with a ‘/’ instead of placing ‘index.html’ or the default.asp filename in the URL.

Get rid of Session IDs if you have a PHP site

If your site is built using PHP and if the cookies aren’t available, a unique PHPSESSID gets added to the URLs. Each time search engine robots visit a page in your site they will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL and assume that it is a different page each time. This could lead to your site getting banned for having duplicating content.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files

Almost every site that exists today uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While it is true that both do a great job enhancing the user experience, they do nothing to improve your search engine ranking. When Search engines rans a site they consider the percentage of code relevant to the search term. Considering the latter CSS and JavaScript will drown your text in hundreds of lines of code and can even end up hurting your sites ranking.

You can avoid this happening by putting all lengthy coding in separate files and including them in your page by reference. It will also be possible to reduce it all to just one and increase the amount of code in the file with relevant content.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts

Unless tables are absolutely necessary, it is best to avoided them. There can be SEO benefits of using CSS layouts over tables. CSS layouts significantly minimize the amount of code i.e. content invisible to the user. The less on-page code the better it is.

Validate your site

It is not a must that a site should be perfectly coded to rank highly in the search engines. However, valid HTML will help search engines and browsers accurately see your page. Validating usually identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or unacceptable by some browsers.

Categorise the content

The most natural way to have organised content on a website is through categorisation. Segment your web content into different categories and have the most important information pages linked to the homepage.

If you have vast amounts of information for each category you might want to narrow it down by including only essential information. Be it on similar topics, types of products or geography, categorisation is natural Search engine optimisation. The more categories you have, the more key phrases there will be available to be targeted from your website. A higher number of key phrases will help you attract a wide and more diversified target audience.

Site Map

If you are still worried that your important pages may not get indexed, consider adding a sitemap to your website. The sitemap is a kind of index page that lists links to all of the pages in the site. Linking a sitemap to your home page will give a robot easy access to all of the pages of your site. Robots normally follow less than 100 links from one page; if yours is a large site consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.

Search engine optimisation involves many elements that need your consideration. Making your pages robot accessible should be the first step of your optimisation process.