Website Design for Successful Search Engine Optimization.

  When building any public web site, the goal is presumably to disseminate the greatest amount of relevant information (or products in the case of a commerce enabled site) to people in search of what the site offers. When architecting a site, a major consideration should be gaining exposure "naturally", making the site itself search engine and directory friendly. A web site can contain a gold mine of information, and sell the best products on earth, but but people must be able to find it easily. Most studies indicate that the dominant way people find new web sites is through search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) and Web Directories (YAHOO!, Look Smart). Search engines and directories provide a fantastic source of targeted visitors to a site. To design a site with this in mind can save a FORTUNE in marketing and promotional costs that less effective traditional media advertising would require.

There are three major issues to keep in mind when designing a site with an eye on promotion:

The use of frames within sites: Building a site is sometimes easier with frames, navigation within the site may be simplified, however, try to bookmark a page in a framed site! The inability to bookmark a specific page within a site presents a definite usability problem for the consumer of a site. Both in terms of recalling information on a specific page, as well as the ability to refer a specific page to another user.

  Assuming your site has lots of quality, non-promotional content, directories may deep link (this is a link to a page or area of a site other than the front page) to your site. If the sites uses frames, a deep link is impossible. How many more visitors would beat a path to your site with an additional listing in YAHOO!? Probably enough to justify avoiding the use of framed sites.

  Search engines, generally don't list framed sites well, and some are simply unable to deal with them. Any page utilizing frame tags is using content from 2 or more different pages. When viewed separately neither page paints a complete picture of the information in a meaningful way. Search engines may index and list a page that contains only a navigation bar. If a page containing only a navigation bar ranks well in the search engines, it may generate hits to your site, but chances are it will confuse the visitor who clicks on the listing, and once disappointed, the visitor is not likely to return.

  Link popularity (the number and quality of sites that link to a web page) is becoming an important factor in determining page rank. As mentioned above, it's impossible to link to a specific page within a framed site, so pages within your site, even if they can be listed by the search engines will not benefit from link popularity.

Dynamically Generated sites: Once a web page is submitted to a search engine, a search engine will often send a spider (a software program that will navigate through a site and explore and sometimes list additional pages within the site) to further explore you site. If the URL contains certain characters including the "?" character, the spider will conclude that there are an infinite number of pages within the site. In order to avoid exploring an infinite information space, and crashing, the search engine spider will refrain from visiting pages with the dynamically generated site. What does this man to you? All the valuable content within your site will be skipped. The home page, and links to any hard coded pages within the site will be listed in the search engines will be skipped. Directories need to link to static pages ( a page that will always be there) as well, so kiss any deep links from directories to content rich areas of your site good-bye as well.

Cookies and registration forms stop search engines in their tracks. People can fill out forms and accept cookies, but search engines can't. Making all visitors register is a deterrent in and of itself to people diving in to a site past the front page.

The latest plug-in or fancy technology: Guess what? Most search engines don't do well indexing Flash, Shockwave or other bleeding edge technology content in a web page. Technology is evolving, and some search engines are beginning to recognize some types or non HTML files, but for the most search engines don't work well with these file types.

  It is erroneous to assume all (or even most) visitors to a web site have the latest version of a plug-in needed to view the latest technological marvels that can be included in a web site. Should you choose to deck out a site, keep in mind that much of the content within graphics, sound, and multimedia files will not be recognized by the search engines. Keep in mind, that the benchmark against which commerce sites are often judged is Amazon, which is said to be fully accessible with even version 1.X versions of Netscape.