The navigation of a website is an important aspect. A site with easy and intuitive navigation structure allows the site visitors to easily find and reach the pages that they want. Apart from it's implication in User Interface, it also assists search engines in figuring out which pages are important. Search Engines mainly base their search results on a page level but they also like to take a macro site level view of page's importance. All sites have a home page/index page which is the main page of a site and as the term suggests is the page which is most frequented by visitors. Home page also serves as the base from where visitors are directed to various other sections of the website.
A webmaster must strive to create a naturally flowing and intuitive hierarchy. The user should be able to navigate easily from page to page and section to section. Webmaster should avoid complex webs of internal links in which every page is linked to every page. “Breadcrumbs” – a row of internal links located at top or bottom of site should be used effectively to enable the site visitor to navigate back to main section or home page. Use text links as much as possible as they can be read easily by search engines. Webmasters are also advised to have useful 404 page that guides the user back to a relevant section or page with a link back the home page in case site visitor encounters a broken link or types in an incorrect URL. Generic messages like “page not found” should be avoided and appropriate messages should be used. Also, 404 custom pages should have same look and feel as rest of the website.
Small sites generally have a small number of pages. For a website with lot of content and subject matter, it may be better to divide each subject and its matter in to separate web pages. In ecommerce sites, there are usually hundreds of categories, sub categories and numerous products. In such cases, the site structure may have different directories and pages for each of them. This is will provide logical and physical hierarchy in a site.
A home page may not have (and is not advisable also) to have links to all the pages of a site. In such cases to ensure that visitors and search engine bots are able to know what all pages are there in the website and effectively navigate to pages of their choices, along with a navigation menu, a sitemap is also provided. A sitemap is a webpage that shows the structure of a website and has a hierarchical listing of all the pages. A sitemap has very important implications for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine bots while visiting a sitemap is able to get a listing of all pages and hence crawl all the web pages. Site visitors can also use sitemap to access in case of difficult in navigation. A sitemap is primarily for human consumption.
An XML Sitemap with a standard defined by Google has also been introduced, which makes it easier for Google bots to crawl through your site.
Sitemaps should be kept up to date to avoid any broken links.
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Friday, September 18, 2009
Search Engine Optimization Guide for Beginners – Navigate your Way to Success
Thursday, September 10, 2009
How to Detect Fake SEO Consultants
How to Detect Fake SEO Consultants
Enovabiz Solutions is a professional Dallas Internet Marketing Firm offering SEO consultancy throughout USA. We provide exclusive SEO Services in Arizona and Phoenix SEO Solutions and online marketing. For exclusive SEO Services in Dallas contact us now. Our SEO packages suit every budget and business. And we DELIVER!
Monday, August 31, 2009
Search Engine Optimization Guide for beginners – URL Structure
By creating descriptive categories and filenames for the web pages of your website, you not only keep the site better organized and systematic, but it can also benefit you in terms of good rankings on Google for your keywords. Since the search engine bots can easily crawl your organized website, search engines will be able to glean much more information from your site. Webmaster can also create search engine friendly URLs. These URLs are not only more legible and easier to understand, but also are better for those who want to place your webpage link on their website. Long and cryptic page names may put off or scare visitors. Page names (URLs) like these can be confusing and intimidating and don't serve any purpose. Such URLS are difficult to remember. A small % of users always try to go a particular website by recalling its name. But in these scenarios, your URL may elude his/her memory. Many times these long URLs are shortened due to ignorance of a user or shortage of space like in twitter where the number of characters that can be entered is limited. In these cases, the link is broken. Sometimes, the URL itself is used as anchor text, if the URL contains relevant keywords, it will assist user and search engine bots in determining the true nature and substance of the web page. This is much better than an unintelligible URL with loads of parameters which does not help in any way in improving your rankings.
Also, in search engine search results pages, just below the webpage's title and description snippet, the URL to the webpage is provided. And if the search query matches the words in the URL, then those words appear in bold. This immediately signals to the user making the search that this page is relevant.
Webmaster should avoid URLs with unnecessary session IDs and parameters. While adding keywords to URL is a good idea, don't go overboard with it. A simple and intuitive directory structure also helps bots. Avoid deep nested subdirectories and also keep name of the directories relevant.
Search Engines are getting sophisticated with each passing days and unlike in earlier days, they can now crawl pages with any kind of URL structure – simple or complex. But it's in webmaster's interest to keep the URL as simple and relevant as possible. Few minutes and bit of care in selecting and making search engine friendly URL can help both users and search engines in long run. This can also be done using URL rewriting technique in case of dynamically generated web pages.
Adhering to above mentioned guidelines can benefit any webmaster in more than one way. User Interaction ease as well as benefits from better rankings makes these suggestions important in today's highly competitive business scenario. So be wise.
Enovabiz Solutions is a professional Dallas Internet Marketing Firm offering SEO consultancy throughout USA. We provide exclusive Arizona SEO Services and online marketing. For exclusive Dallas SEO Services contact us now. Our SEO packages suit every budget and business. And we DELIVER!
Sunday, August 23, 2009
SEO Guide for Beginners - Meta Tags
Continuing on our series on SEO for beginners, we will discuss Meta tags. Hypertext Markup Language or HTML lets author of a webpage specify more details about the document rather than the document content itself using Meta data.
The information that is in the Meta data is used by search engines like Google to update their database. Search Engines figure out that a webpage is related to some keywords and when someone searches for a particular keyword, s/he will be able to find this page in SERPs. The Meta tags are generally located near the top of the HTML document inside the Header tag.
According to W3C, “Each META element specifies a property/value pair. The name attribute identifies the property and the content attribute specifies the property's value.”
There are many types of Meta tags. But the two most crucial Meta tag for search engine indexing are the keywords and the description Meta tags. The Meta tag – “keywords” lists the keywords or key phrases that best describe the contents of the webpage in question.
In context of Google the dominant search engine, “Description” Meta tag is even more important and relevant. A webpage's “description” Meta tag provides Google and other search engines a summary of what the webpage is all about. Unlike a page's title which should ideally consist of few words, a description Meta tag can be a sentence or even short paragraph. The reason the Description Meta tag is important is because Google may decide to use it as a snippet for your pages when showing your site's listing on search results. In case, Google search engine notices that your page text content is more relevant to the user's query then Google may show that snippet from the webpage's text content. So it's advisable that webmasters and SEO consultants make the best use of this tag. A well written Meta tag can also make a difference to page rankings.
Also, when a user searches for a keyword in Google search engine, the results show description tag with keywords in bold. This immediately gives searcher clues if the result has the matching keywords and if it is relevant. A proper Meta tag may also results in higher click through and hence more traffic.
Few points should be kept I mind while creating meta tag description. Describe the page accurately in the description tag. Description Meta tag helps both search engines and user alike so it should match your site's content and title. Avoid generic or default description provided by WYSIWYG editors. Never add unrelated description, this is spamming and Search Engines may not take it lightly. Also, always create unique description Meta tags for all pages of the website.
To check if your description Meta tags conform to Google's guidelines, Google provides Webmaster Tools provides a content analysis section that analyses and points out if any description Meta tags is too short, long, or duplicated too many times across the website.
Enovabiz Solutions is a professional Dallas Internet Marketing Firm offering SEO consultancy throughout USA. We provide exclusive Arizona SEO Services and online marketing. For exclusive Dallas SEO Services contact us now. Our SEO packages suit every budget and business. And we DELIVER!