No one can find
my site, what do I do?
Search Engines 102 - Part #2, Improving Spiderability
by Alli Denning
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In Part #1 of this article, I talked about content development, page
titles and their enormous impact on a site's placement and efficacy
in the search engines. In this follow up article, I will step back
and discuss issues that relate to the indexability or spiderability
of your site. Now that you have all that great content in place, it
is time to make sure that the search engines can find it.
What is spiderability and why is it so important?
Let’s start with a definition of spiderability (synonymous with
indexability).
Spiderability: A measure of how well a site can be indexed (or
crawled) - by a search engine (SE) spider (the software program that
SEs use to gather information off the web).
Whether or not (and how well) your site is spiderable will have a
direct impact on your site’s search engine rankings, making this
factor one of the most important in search engine optimization. A
site must be built in a way that allows the search engine spiders to
crawl the entire site, gathering all of the site’s relevant
information/content, not just that of the home page.
What can I do to improve my site's spiderability?
Here is a list of the top five issues related to spiderability. You
can check these against your site to determine areas of potential
improvement. In addition, I offer solutions for each spiderability
problem just under its explanation.
1. Frames – A
site built using frames has a distinct disadvantage in the search
engines. If not coded correctly, the SE spiders may not be
able to find your keyword-rich pages of content.
Solution:
Do not design
or build your site using frames. If your site is already built
using frames, consider a re-build or make sure that the proper work-arounds are in place to ensure
spiderability.
2. Image-Based Navigation – Ask your web developer if your
site has image-based navigation. SE Spiders can not follow these
links and are therefore stopped from ever getting any farther than
the home page if there is no alternate method for them to follow.
(Solution shown under #3 below)
JavaScript-Based Navigation – As with #2 above, you will
need to ask your web developer if your site’s navigation uses
JavaScript. As with image-based links, the SEs will not follow the
JavaScript links, providing a barrier to the SE spiders.
Solution: A simple set of text links along the bottom of
your site’s pages will correct both problems #2 and #3. See any
page of my site for an example of this work-around in place. The SE
spiders can follow these text links, allowing them to index deeper
into the site’s content.
3. CSS and JavaScript code embedded in the page – SE spiders
are only interested in the visible body text of your web pages.
They are not interested in the style sheets or JavaScript. Often,
these sets of code appear in the <HEAD> section of the site’s code,
increasing download time and pushing the keyword-rich content down
further in the code.
Solution: JavaScript and CSS code should not be embedded on
each page, but instead put into an external file that is simply
referenced in each page of the site. Doing so has several
advantages, but one of the most compelling is that your site's
keywords and content all move up, up, up in the code, signaling to
the search engines their importance and boosting your site's
relevancy ratings.
4. Lack of Site Map – A site map serves not only to aid the
site user in finding the needed information as quickly as possible,
but it ensures that the SE spider is able to follow text links to
all the main pages of your site.
Solution: Create a complete site map and include a text
link to it along the bottom of every page in your site.
Coming Next: Part #3
will discuss Google's new program, Google Sitemaps, and how you can
use it to your advantage. |
