Can the design of my website affect my rankings?
This phase assists you in determining if your site utilizes any programming formats that limit search engine exposure. Special marketing techniques need to be implemented in order to get around these elements. For the most effective search engine exposure we highly recommend a static HTML site. In addition, having a site map and navigation buttons on every page is also a good practice, as well as hypertext links at the bottom of every page in the site, for every page in the site.
First here are two things we know play a role in rankings.
- Purchase your domain name for 10 years.
- Make sure your site is W3 compliant. To check for compliancy please go to www.w3.org
Aspects to look for:
CyberMark International optimizes websites with these aspects in mind, but it is more costly and the results are not as dramatic. If you are not sure, Click Here obtain a free website evaluation.
If your site does utilize any of the above list, here are some general tactics we use to give our clients the ability to rank.
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Flash (top)
Flash is a plug-in file that is embedded within a webpage. The web page itself should be optimized. While search engine robots do have the ability to read the text within flash files, the technology is fairly new and not very accurate, for example can you remember any time you searched on a search engine and found a flash web site in the search results pages? The chances are you have never even seen a flash website in any search engine index. If the entire site is in Flash, the search engine will not be able to detect inside content, which destroys rankings. Flash can hurt in conversions due to load time and the lack of rankings, so it is best to avoid all-flash, or heavy flash websites when ever possible.
A solution would be to offer up a non-flash version of your website in conjunction with the Flash website. Then you have the best of both worlds without hurting your search engine exposure.
Smaller Flash elements within a regular non-flash website generally won’t cause any problems, as long as they are small file sizes.
Frames (top)
Frames can act as a barrier between your optimized text and the search engine spiders. Search engines cannot always effectively crawl and index your site if frames are utilized.
The best solution would be to take the site out of frames, we highly recommend it.
If that is not possible then another solution would be to place your Meta tags in the frames portion, at the top of your programming, and also in the no frames portion. Make sure there is text in the no frames programming along with invisible links to stationary HTML pages. If the engines cannot read all of the pages they can identify the HTML pages and index from those. This results in making your site look like a no frames site to the engines.
Please note that sites targeting very general, competitive terms will have extreme difficulty usually ranking with frames.
Dynamic Websites (ASP, Cold Fusion, etc.)
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Active Server Pages (ASP) and Cold Fusion (CFM) are examples of programming languages used to dynamically generated websites. There are three main problems with dynamic URL’s and SEO.
1. In most dynamically generated websites the URL string can be very long and include many symbols and variables. While in recent years the search engine robots have had better success in crawling dynamic URL’s, they can still have trouble crawling dynamic generated URL’s and on occasions won’t crawl them at all.
2. A highly unique and descriptive URL string or file name can help SEO a great deal. Dynamic URL’s generally are only unique by a 1 to 3 digit number and not descriptive at all, example: pagename.asp?id=1, pagename.asp?id=2, pagename.asp?id=3 etc
3. Unique title and meta tags are highly important to SEO. Some dynamic sites can use the same page template for every page in the website, including title and meta tags.
There are sound solutions to avoid the above problems. A technique called “ModRewrite” can be used to retro fit an existing site. A ModRewrite will take the dynamic URL and change it to an SEO friendly URL, at the same time it will remove symbols and variables to make the URL easily crawlable by the search engine robots. If your site has not yet been built, it is a lot easier to avoid these problems from the get go. You just need to be sure your developer is aware and has the knowledge to develop your website in such a way to avoid these issues.
It is highly recommended to start a CPC campaign, along with your natural search engine listings no matter how your site is designed. If you are unable to redesign your site or remedy the issues associated with a dynamically generated website, then CPC is essential. This can be very expensive, so make sure you track your results using an affiliate program also watch for click fraud. CyberMark manages CPC campaigns and we can make the most of your budget. An affiliate program tells you how many clicks, sales, conversions, and/or contact forms were received after each term. CyberMark has a great affiliate program to offer, as well as we closely watch for click fraud, so please inquire with one of our sales representatives. We also save companies thousands of dollars managing their CPC programs.
Websites with no inside pages (top)
A website with no inside pages may never be indexed by a search engine spider. Search engines want their database full of valuable content to drive searchers to. If they only find a homepage, there is a very good chance that your website will not have enough content to be considered valuable. Search engines look for websites with a main theme on the homepage that develops into relating themes on the inside pages.
Heavy files that lengthen download time
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Many search engines will not wait for large images, Flash files, or audio files to download before they leave your website un-indexed. Always test the load time of your homepage on a 56k connection. If it does not load fast you will most likely not rank well. Google will stop indexing a web page once it is larger than 100k.
Incorrect Directory Structures
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For small to medium websites, always place all inside pages on the same server level as your index.html webpage such as "your-website.com/aboutus.html." Many web designers have been taught to create separate folders for each inside webpage leaving a link that looks similar to whatever.com/aboutus/aboutus.html." This structure can cause very serious limitations to the successful indexing of your website as many spiders will not index too many subfolders deep within your website. This applies only to page files, not image or code files.
For very large websites with 100+ pages it is okay to use sub directories to make your files more manageable. When naming the sub directories, use keywords when possible, this helps with usability as well as SEO. We suggest to use not more than one sub directory deep.
Excessive Inline Javascript(top)
Excessive inline JavaScript or CSS, for image roll-over effects for example, can cause longer load times as the search engine spider must crawl through the excessive code. Place all JavaScript and CSS in external files, if possible.
Redirect or Pointers(top)
Redirected domains or pointers to your website can cause problems with the search engines. The only search engine friendly redirect is a “301 redirect”. This redirect tells the search engines it is a permanent redirect. When a robot comes across a 301 redirect it will remember not to go back to that domain name, and will index the domain name it was redirected to.
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