How To Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
The following is a guide on optimizing your website and improving its rankings on search engine results pages, according to Microsoft’s Small Business Center.
1. Potential site design problems
- Search engines do a poor job of indexing frames and your site is better off without them.
- Most search engines cannot or will not list dynamic URLs that contain any of the following: ?, &, %, +, =, cgi-bin, or .cgi.
- Search engines cannot index splash pages that are made mostly or entirely from Flash. Hyperlinks made with Flash cannot be spidered by the search engines. So, unless you add standard HTML hyperlinks, none of your pages will be spidered.
- Sites that use Image Maps for navigation run the risk of not being accessible to search engines because the web crawler often gets trapped in the code that makes up the Image Map.
- Search engines also cannot follow links found in Javascript.
- Any of the previous three indexing problems can be addressed by creating a site map page using standard HTML links that link to every page and adding a standard HTML link on each page that links back to the site map.