 |
|||
| |||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
| ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
|
Every Search Engine Robot Needs Validation
Your website is ready. Your content is in place, you have optimized your pages. What is the last thing you should do before uploading your hard work? Validate. It is surprising how many people do not validate the source code of their web pages before putting them online. Search engine robots are automated programs that traverse the web, indexing page content and following links. Robots are basic, and robots are definitely not smart. Robots have the functionality of early generation browsers: they don't understand frames; they can't do client-side image maps; many types of dynamic pages are beyond them; they know nothing of JavaScript. Robots can't really interact with your pages: they can't click on buttons, and they can't enter passwords. In fact, they can only do the simplest of things on your website: look at text and follow links. Your human visitors need clear, easy-to-understand content and navigation on your pages; search engine robots need that same kind of clarity. Looking at what your visitors and the robots need, you can easily see how making your website "search engine friendly", also makes the website visitor friendly. For example, one project I worked on had many validation problems. Because of the huge number of errors generated by problems in the source code, the search engine robots were unable to index the web page, and in particular, a section of text with keyword phrases identified specifically for this page. Ironically, human users had problems with the page as well. Since humans are smart, they could work around the problem, but the robots could not. Fixing the source code corrected the situation for human and automated visitors. There are several tools available to check your HTML code. One of the easiest to use is published by the W3C (http://validator.w3.org/). While you're there, you can also validate your CSS code at W3C's page for CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/). The reports will tell you what source code needs to be fixed on your web page. One extra or unclosed tag can cause problems. With valid code, you make it easier for your human visitors and search engine robots can travel through your website and index your pages without source code errors stopping them in their tracks. How many times have you visited a website, only to find something broken when going through the web pages? Too many too count, I'm sure. Validating your pages makes everything easier for your website to get noticed. As I said before, what works for your website visitors works for the search engine robots. Usability is the key for both your human visitors and automated robots. Why not provide the best chance for optimum viewing by both? Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company. Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com) - All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Using Google Thanks to a unique algorithm that produces most relevant results to any given query, Google has become, indisputably, the best search engine on the Internet. On the last count, Google has indexed over 4 billion pages and tackles around 200 million searches a day! A cluster of 100 thousand servers are used to store, crunch and spew out the query results with lightning speed that you are so accustomed to see. Google Traffic Report Card-Does Your Website Pass? Part 1 This is part 1 of a 7 part series that examines the 7 factors of incoming links that Google considers when choosing a spot for your website in it's SERP's.Why incoming links? First because these are what Google places the highest value on. Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website - Step 5: Internal Linking Welcome to part five in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of content optimization. Google Sitemaps Explained - How To Use Google Sitemaps Three Ways To Index Your Site With Google Sitemaps[Difficult, Hard, And Easy]Google has recently implemented a program where any webmaster can create a Sitemap of their Site and submit it for indexingby Google. It is a quick and easy way for you to keep yoursite constantly indexed and updated in Google. SEO Expert Guide - Conclusions (part 10/10) As you have seen throughout the guide, search engine optimization (SEO) is a multi-faceted activity. Likely to be time-consuming, it is important that you spend your time wisely. Search Term Suggestion Tool Overture.com offers a cool function to assist you on your quest to find unique keywords. World of Website Promotion Website promotion is a big and ongoing process. Every person who has website should have little knowledge about various elements involved in website promotion even if he had hired a SEO. Absolute & Relative Links How Do They Rank? The question for this article is whether or not you should use "absolute url's" or "relative url's"? Not only that, this article researches whether or not Google ranks these methods differently.Absolute: You use the entire url pointing to the designated page. Do-It-Yourself Keyword Optimization The first step in a search engine optimization campaign is to choose your keywords or keyphrases for each of your web pages. Keywords are the terms that search engine users type in the search box to conduct a query. Search Engine Optimisation - Getting Targeted Traffic Getting SEO right is an art and it's based on theory and best practice. The search engines don't publish their algorithms so getting it right is like finding the exact formula for Coca Cola. Increase Web Site Sales with a SEO Proposal - Part 2 Part I of this article discussed some of the points that should be included in a search engine optimization proposal. Visit the resources section at the bottom of the page if you wish to get a copy of the whole article. The Small Screen SEO! First of all, What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the art of making your pages efficient for search engine robots in order to get your site listed in the top of their results, preferrably on the first page and within the top 10. We can easily achieve this if we know how the search engine is reading our sites, so we can further tweak our pages and make it to the top. How To Use Google As A Niche Website Builder The popularity of weblogs or blogs has gotten a lot of attention from the media recently. In fact, "blog" was picked as the word of the year by Merriam-Webster, a U. How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking With search engines like Google currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a top search engine ranking. Type in a popular search phrase such as "Internet Marketing" into Yahoo or Google and you will be returned over 8 million results!Unless your website is in the first two or three pages, it is unlikely that you will receive many visitors from search engines. How Search Engines Work Before anyone can start optimizing a web site, you must understand how search engines work.Search engine optimization is the hardest thing to do for a webmaster because there are so many rules to it and you have to stay up to date with all the new search engine optimization techniques. Keyword Research Made Simple! Keyword Research is the first task in optimizing your web site and pay-per-click campaign. Here you need to know what keywords your target group is using. Feed Those Hungry WIIFM Monsters, Get Them To Multiply Everyone packs their website with keywords in order to feed those keyword-hungry search engines spiders.Just do not starve your potential customers by forgetting to have the food they like:ample helpings of benefitstips rich in protein (practical)automatic weekly feedings (like a newsletter)If you (affectionately) look upon your potential customers as if they are WIIFM monsters, and understand how to care for and feed them, there will be no scary nightmares (unprofitable websites). KEI Concerns and CID Alternative Like many folks, I have been using KEI for some time now to determine what keywords I should target with my web site. And this has led me to becoming concerned with the results KEI provides and the keywords it suggests. SEO Expert Guide - Search Engines Explained (part 1/10) Before we explore the world of search engine optimization, it is vital that you know a little about how search engines work and their relative market shares. It will help you to prioritize your activities later!(a) What are Search Engines and who powers them?There are essentially four different parts to a typical large search engine; the crawler, the directory, sponsored results and the search engine itself. Branding Versus SEO Branding versus search engine optimization is a marketing dilemma that larger companies will need to come to grips with on the Internet. Often companies will need to decide whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a more generic keyword phrase.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
