One of the most fundamental aspects of search engineoptimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within yourwebsite are as accessible as possible to the search engines.It's not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, butalso the internal pages within a site's structure. The internalpages of a site often contain important content such asproducts, services or general information, and therefore can beuniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy accessto these pages is vital.
There are many do's and don'ts involved in ensuring all of yourpages can be found by search engines. However, it is importantto first establish how the search engines find and index webpages.
Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders")to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. A robotis a computer programme that can follow the hyperlinks on a webpage, which is known as "crawling". When a robot finds adocument it includes the contents within the search engine'sindex, then follows the next links it can find and continues theprocess of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomesapparent that the navigational structure of a website isimportant in getting as many pages as possible indexed.
When considering the navigational structure of your site, thehierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judgewhat they feel to be the most important pages of a site whenconsidering rankings and a page's position in the site structurecan influence this. The homepage is generally considered themost important page of a site - it is the top level document andusually attracts the most inbound links. From here, searchengine robots can normally reach pages that are within threeclicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pagesshould be one click away, the next important two clicks away andso forth.
The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together.Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links,meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submitbuttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with querystrings that have two or more parameters are also typicallyignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generatedwebsite.
The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTMLtext links, as not only can they be followed by robots but thetext contained in the anchor can also be used to describe thedestination page - an optimisation plus point. Image links arealso acceptable but the ability to describe the destination pageis diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much rankingweight as anchor text.
The most natural way to organise content on a website is tocategorise it. Break down your products, services or informationinto related categories and then structure this so that the mostimportant aspects are linked to from the homepage. If you have avast amount of information for each category then again you willwant to narrow your content down further. This could involvehaving articles on a similar topic, different types of productfor sale, or content that can be broken down geographically.Categorisation is natural optimisation - the further you breakdown your information the more content you can provide and themore niche key phrases there are that can be targeted.
If you are still concerned that your important pages may not getindexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your website.A sitemap can be best described as an index page - it is a listof links to all of the pages within a site contained on onepage. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it givesa robot easy access to all of the pages within your site. Justremember - robots typically can't follow more than 100 linksfrom one page, so if your site is larger than this you may wantto consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.
There are many considerations to make when optimising your sitefor search engines, and making your pages accessible to searchengine robots should be the first step of your optimisationprocess. Following the advice above will help you make yourentire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple rankingsand extra traffic.
About the author:Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive forUK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. Clients ofWebEvents benefit from a range of services designed to maximiseROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visithttp://www.webeventseurope.com.
