Uniquely built web sites can create unique issues when being promoted on
search engines. From a basic 3 page brochure site to a corporate site with hundreds of dynamically generated pages, every web site needs to have certain design aspects in order to achieve full effects of an SEO campaign. Below are a few points to take into consideration when building or updating your web site.1. Size Matters. The size of a web site can have a huge impact on search engine rankings. Search engines love content, so if you have only a few pages to your site and your competitors have dozens, it's difficult to see a top page ranking for your site. In some cases it may be difficult to present several pages of information about your business or products, so you may need to think about adding free resources for visitors. It will help in broadening scope of your web site (which search engines like) as well as keep visitors on your site longer, possibly resulting in more sales.
2. Graphics-Based Web Sites. While web sites that offer visitor a more esthetically-pleasing experience may seem like best choice for someone searching for your product, they are most difficult to optimize. Since search engine robots cannot read text within graphics or animation, what they see may be just a small amount of text. And if we learned anything from point #1, small amounts of content will not result in top rankings. If you really must offer visitor a graphics-heavy or Flash web site, consider creating an html-based side of your site that is also available to visitors. This site will be much easier to promote on search engines and your new found visitors will also have option to jump over to nicer looking part of your site.
3. Dynamic Web Pages. If most of your web site is generated by a large database (such as a large book dealer with stock that is changing by minute) you may find that some of your pages do not get indexed by major search engines. If you look at URL of these pages they can be extremely long and have characters such as ?, #, &, %, or = along with huge amounts of seemingly random numbers or letters. Since these pages are automatically generated by database as needed, search engines have a tough time keeping them up to date and relevant for search engine users.
One way to combat this problem is to offer a search engine friendly site map listing all your static pages just to let them know that you do have permanent content on your site. If search engines see links going to and from these dynamic pages within a good internal linking system, this may also lead to pages getting indexed. The link popularity of your site may carry more weight in this case as well, so if you can't offer as much static content as your competition, make sure you have an aggressive link campaign on go.
4. Proper Use of HTML. There is quite a bit of sub-par web design software out there. Word processors usually have a way to create HTML documents which can be easily uploaded to a site via ftp. However, in many cases code that search engine robots see is mostly lines and lines of font and position formatting, not relevant content. The more efficiently written web sites usually achieve higher rankings. Our choice for web design software is Macromedia Dreamweaver, as it is an industry standard. It also makes using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) a breeze, which can drastically cut down on amount of text formatting in HTML code. Hand-coding HTML to design sites is also a good method if you are proficient enough.
