Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
- Emerging trends
Search Engine–Friendly Web Site Structure
Search engines encounter two kinds of obstacles:
- Technical challenges that prevent the search engine spider from accessing content
- A competitive marketing environment where everyone wants to rank highly
To ensure that search engines can access your content, you must remove technical barriers. Those who
wish to achieve the best results must follow best Web development practices. These best practices are
outlined in Chapter 13 "Web Site Development and Design".
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz says, “The key to ensuring that a site’s contents are fully crawlable is to provide
direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember that if a page
cannot be accessed from the home page (where most spiders are likely to start their crawl) it is likely that
it will not be indexed by the search engines.” [1]
Chapter 13 "Web Site Development and Design" delves more deeply into building a search engine–
friendly Web site.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Search engines encounter two kinds of obstacles:
o Technical challenges that prevent the search engine spider from accessing content
o A competitive marketing environment where everyone wants to rank highly - You must remove technical barriers.
[1] Rand Fishkin, The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, SEOmoz, February 25, 2006,
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization (accessed April 3, 2008).