If you want your website to be indexed by search engines, it is important that your site has a good link architecture. The link architecture of your website is the method that you use to link from your website pages to other pages of your website.
How search engines find the web pages on your website
Search engines use so-called spiders or robots to index web pages. Search engine spiders are relatively simple software programs. When they visit your web pages, they follow all links that they can find on the page to index the other pages of your website. Most search engines follow only text links.
JavaScript menus, Flash menus and search boxes cannot be accessed by most search engine spiders. That means that search engines will only index the web pages of your website that can be easily found by their spiders.
Five internal linking tips that will improve your search engine rankings
Most search engine spiders do not type into your search boxes and they do not use pull down menus. The following tips will help you to make sure that search engine spiders will index your web pages correctly:
- Use simple text links to link to your web pages
Most search engines cannot index fancy Flash or JavaScript menus. Some even have difficulty with image links. If possible, use simple text links to link to your web pages. You can make text links prettier by styling them with CSS.
- Your most important pages should not be more than one click away from the index page
Web pages that can be accessed with a few clicks from your home page are considered more important than web pages that are buried deep inside your website. It's easier to get high rankings for these easy to access pages.
- Use descriptive link texts
The text that you use to link to your web pages helps search engines to better understand your content. If you sell shoes on your website, do not use links such as Click here but descriptive link texts such as business shoes.
That makes it easier for search engines to put the page into a context and it will be more likely that the page gets high rankings for the keyword "business shoes".
- Create a sitemap
A sitemap is a simple web page that contains link to all important pages of your website. You could add a link to your sitemap in the footer of every web page. By doing this, search engines can find all important pages with two clicks.
- Check the validity of your HTML code
Errors in the HTML code of your web pages can prevent search engines from indexing your web pages correctly. For example, an HTML error might indicate the end of a web page before the actual content begins. That would mean that search engines would skip the content and any links of that page. You can access the official W3C HTML validator in the Tools menu in IBP.
No comments:
Post a Comment