SEO Friendly Web Site Construction

What, exactly, does SOE friendly or Search Engine Friendly (SEF) really mean?

The short answer is that a search engine friendly site allows a search engine to easily crawl and index the content of that web site.

A slightly more complex answer: There are many things that a developer can do that can help or hinder search engines in their quest to gather information.

The first step in creating a SEF web site is to make it easy for the search engine to actually find and index the content of that site. The best way to do this is to create well formed, semantically correct, standards compliant (X)HTML. While there are many errors that a search engine can recover from, there are some that will cause a search engine to stop dead in its tracks. Exactly what errors will not cause harm and those that will are...? Well, those that run the search engines usually keep their inner workings to themselves, so this is not an easy question to answer. The best solution to the problem is to make sure there are no errors at all, then there is nothing for the search engine to choke on.

What a search engine is really looking for is text. If your site does not contain much in the way of searchable text, then there is no real way for a search engine to get anything meaningful from the site. The implications of this are that sites built using such technologies as Flash and Flex are not search engine friendly. Those that build these sites will argue the case saying things like "You can still use meta information tags", but a search engine really needs more detailed information than this. Here, we are talking about the real content of the site, the text in the pages and not what the developer uses to describe what is there. Real text, headings, paragraphs, words, etc... hold a greater weight than text that a visitor does not see. Then there is the case of dynamically generated content. This is content supplied by a database or some other means that can change at any time. There is no real way to allow a search engines easy access to this content without using text. At W3 Teck, we may use some flash elements, but until the search engines can get into these files and discover what is in them, we will not build a site that depends entirely on such technology. They may look pretty, but they will not perform as well as a text based site.

If the goal of your web site is to attract visitors, to allow them to find your web site in a natural search for the specific information they are looking for and to make conversions, then your best bet for doing so is the site that delivers the most real text. If, however, your goal is to create a centerpiece that you can drag out for display, which you must advertise by other means than by searches in order to get people to visit your site, then by all means, find a company that is good at it and give them your money.

To answer this for yourself, just ask this question: If these technologies could be easily indexed by search engines, wouldn't large sites such as Amazon, eBay and others be using them by now? Wouldn't someone have built a blog or discussion site using this technology?

There are other issues involved with search engine friendliness. There are even things that can be done to effectively get a web site banned from a search engine. W3 Teck will never use any suspicious methods in the construction of a web site such as hiding text that is only place in the page in an effort to increase ranking.

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