Search Engine Friendly Website Basics

A Search Engine Friendly website is designed to be easily accessed and comprehended by various search engines. Unfortunately not all websites are created to be SEF. A few factors that may prevent SEF are coding errors, page layout and design issues, and lack of proper page navigation and linking.

Website Coding Errors

A variety of factors can create errors in a website's code which can confuse search engines and prevent a website from being indexed and / or ranked properly. Not all website developers check their code to ensure it is error free. Also, copying and pasting content from popular word processing software may include code and symbols which search engines understand. Some coding errors are easy to identify because they will cause rendering issues within Internet browsers; however, not all errors are visible and may be causing unnecessarily low search engine rankings for many websites.

Page Layout and Design Issues

Search engine do not visually view websites as people do. Instead, search engines must interpret a web page's content by analyzing the website's code. Visual elements such as videos or images do not provide as much meaning to search engines as they do to people.

Page Navigation and Linking

A search engine needs to be able to access a page in order to analyze and rank it. Some websites contain great content, but the content is not linked to from the main web pages, and therefore not accessible by search engines. A SEF website contains the proper navigation elements and page links to ensure all pages are accessible to search engines. Sitemaps are also a great tool that allow search engines to identify all of a website's content.