Basics of Search Engine Friendly Webpage Designs – Part 1

Webpage design has great importance in Search Engine Optimization. A website with search engine friendly web pages can come on top of Search Engine Result easily. Most of the time people spend their hard earned money of website promotion but they couldn’t get desired results. Complex webpage design is among the most important obstacles for these websites, which prevents them from getting indexed by search engines.

So what kind of web pages are search engine friendly? It may seem to be a tough question to answer, but it’s not that tough. Here, I’ll provide some basic principles of webpage design, which helps in designing of search engine friendly web pages.

To start with, I’ll discuss a few things that search engines don’t like. Frames, Flash Videos, HTML errors in pages, poor scripting, and dynamic URL’s are a few things that prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your webpage. Therefore, you need to keep it out of your web page. In order to ensure search engine friendliness you need to follow these basic steps while designing pages of your website:

Validate Your HTML Coding

This is a common problem with several web designers, while designing their web pages, they rarely think about validation of their HTML code. You may have some errors in your HTML code which can prevent search engine crawlers from reading contents of your webpage. To avoid such circumstances, you need to validate you HTML/CSS code for page errors. There are several ways to validate them, but the best is to use W3C validator that is available at http://validator.w3.org. Once your code is validated, your web pages are ready to be indexed by search engine crawlers (if there are no other constraints).

Implement Simple Navigation

Search Engines love simple and easy navigation. Simple HTML pages or static URL’s are welcomed by every search engine crawlers. Search Engines cannot interpret links generated by Java Script. That means, if you are using mechanism of runtime links generated by Java Script code, those pages will not be readable by search engines. Even Links embedded in Flash are not readable by most of search engines.

To avoid such issues, you need to provide an easy navigation to your website. I’ll not suggest you to remove all those Java Script and Flash. You can choose another way by providing simple HTML links to those pages in footer of your website. Adding an HTML sitemap is also suggested, it will help search engine crawlers in accessing all pages in your website.