HOW TO MAKE A SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY WEBSITE

In the course of running a web design and hosting company, I have had numerous requests by various webmasters trying to know why their web pages do not appear in the search engine result pages irrespective of directly searching for terms that is suppose to yield their page. More often than not, a quick review of their website by opensourcehostweb experts shows that they have created a website that is not by any means search engine friendly. rnThis write up has explicitly put together the main points on how to create a website or blog that is absolutely search engine friendly. These points are as follows: • Add Alternate Text to Images, Flash and Videos: The foremost thing any webmaster should consider when creating search engine friendly website is that search engines are software’s that can only read unadulterated text. Unadulterated text means a simple plain ordinary text like the ones you see in this article and not text embedded in images, flash or in videos. Irrespective of the fact that a few search engine has the ability to scan a flash file, it is proven to be rather sophisticated and can only extract straight forward links embedded in the file. However the only search engine that I know that has such ability is Google but remember that it is only links that it can read and not embedded text. Nevertheless, I am not saying that you cannot create a photo album website, flash game or video website that ranks high in the search engine result pages rather I am saying that you should write content for each of the non text elements like images, flash file and videos in your website. By doing so, you are enabling the search engines to be able to read these non text contents thereby improving the indexing of your web page and relatively enhancing your website visibility. In summary, to illustrate explicitly how to do this, you need to describe each non text content (like images, videos etc) in the “alt” text.Though search engines cannot actually see your pictures, they can read the “alt” text and will surely include that while indexing your web page. • Validate Your Website’s Html Code: Validating your website’s html code simply means ensuring the correctness of the codes. Note that the html codes assist the web browser in formatting your web page and presenting it just the way you want it to be. Therefore whether you write your html codes by hand or by What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) web editor, it is important you validate your code by running it through HTML and CSS validators. It is very important to validate your codes because search engines rely on the basic correctness of your codes to find the portion of your web page to index. • Create Important Title Tag: The text appearing in the html tag of your website is very important because many search engines give additional weight to them because they use the title tag as part of the algorithm to determine what your web page is all about. Most webmasters (any person administering a website) do not bother to set the title tag to something meaningful and reflective of what the web page is about rather they just put the website name in the title tag of every page in the website. This is very wrong and doesn’t help in the search engine optimization of your website or blog. For example, if your website is about cheap web hosting, you can have cheap web hosting as the title in the index page and choose other relevant text that relatively reflects the content of that particular web page. See opensourcehostweb.com web pages for a vivid illustration. • Use Only Html Navigational link on Your Website: In as much as search engines do not read text embedded in images, flash file and videos, they do not also read links embedded in flash files and JavaScript too. You are advised to use a simple html links in your web pages and also have a sitemap linked to your home page and all the pages in your website. This is very necessary because it grossly assist search engine spiders/crawlers during web page indexing. • Eliminate Hidden Text: Hidden texts are text included in the main body of your web page that is not displayed on the screen when visitors view your page in a browser. It is no gain saying that some unscrupulous webmasters use hidden text to add keywords to their website In other to influence search engine results and improve their page rank. Rather than achieve the intended purpose they inadvertently end up being penalize by search engines. This is the reason why it is not advisable to be on a free host because most of them will include hidden text, ads or both in your website without your authorization.rnHowever, it is very pertinent to understand that creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that your website will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase but it is an all important first step if you want your website to rank anywhere near the first few pages of a search engine result.