Those of you who have heard that there are changes coming to the SEO landscape need not panic. While it is true that very soon that it is very likely that Google and Bing may be locked in some sort of battle, what you need to do to improve Orange County SEO  is not going to change all that much.

Good, solid orange county search engine optimization practices are still going to be what put you ahead of your competition, even as the largest search engines compete with each other.

You still need to:

Work to increase link popularity

Keep your website architecture in good shape

Optimize your HTML coding

Optimize your meta tags

While attending to some of the more technical aspects of keeping your website going, you also cannot forget content. With competing search engine giants out to dominate, you need to make sure that you have good, quality content for those search engine spiders to crawl through.

And you need to do all you can to diversify your content so that you have something to offer to the search engines on all fronts. This means not just having well-written text that makes good use to keywords, but thinking about images too. You want to have photos and video that is tagged correctly as well. And since the search engines are looking at social media too, make sure your blog and Twitter accounts also employ the most relevant keywords as well.

If this all seems like more that you want to take on right now, why not get some help with Orange County web site development ? You know that your website is vital to your business, but if you cannot devote the kind of time to it that you would like, hire Orange County marketing consultant Increase Visibility to help you get the job done.

Creating a crawlable website is one of the primary goals of effective search engine optimization. In order to drive traffic to your website, your site must not only lure search engine spiders, but maximize their ability to access and index the information on your site. No matter how fabulous your content or graphics, if they can’t be “crawled” by search engine spiders, they can’t help drive traffic to your site.

There are a lot of things that can impede crawlability. One of the important functions of search engine optimization is to maximize the crawlability of your website. An experienced search engine optimization team knows the tricks to ferreting out the content and technical errors that interfere with search engine spiders and bots. Linking errors can be a major impediment to search engine optimization. Last week we talked about some of the linking errors that negatively impact crawlability. Today we want to share some tips that will improve your website’s crawlability.

> Use search engine friendly CSS code when creating navigation elements on your website. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a HTML feature that defines how design elements like headers and links appear on a web page. By ensuring design and linking uniformity, CSS provides better control over how pages are displayed and links are formatted, improving crawlability. CSS creates a more universally searchable site than Flash, JavaScript or Ajax while offering nearly the same dynamic functionality. 

> Use text links to create alternative navigation paths in the footer or breadcrumb navigation. Adding linking opportunities to non-content page elements increases spidering options, improving crawlability. Including a sidebar list of clickable links to your website’s main category and sub-category pages, as well as footer links to important pages, produces additional opportunities for spiders to crawl your site. 

> Add specialized text link pages to your HTML site map. Each text link page can list 100 or fewer text links to important pages on your site. You can create more than one site map page; the key is that each contain less than 100 links. Spiders regularly crawl HTML site maps. By providing links to interior pages within the HTML site map, you increase the opportunity for spiders to discover and crawl those pages. Spiders that miss or have trouble navigating to interior pages via content or other site links will nearly always be able to follow links through your HTML site map.

> Create a XML site map list of all the URLs from your website that you want search engines to crawl. Again, you want to give the search engine spiders as much help and direction as possible. Providing a list of important URLs to supplement information the spiders find on their own is one more way of maximizing the crawlability of your website.

Making certain that search engine spiders can crawl your website is one of the goals of effective search engine optimization. Your site can be well-designed and contain great content and graphics, but if the links to and within your website don’t allow search engines to access and index all of the pages in your site, you’re paying for a lot of dead space. Pages that aren’t crawlable are pages that aren’t actively contributing to your Internet marketing program. The more material on your website that is accessible — crawlable — by search engine spiders, the higher your potential ranking when Internet users initiate a search. One of the primary goals of search engine optimization is to maximize the amount of material accessed and indexed by search engine spiders.

Spiders, also called bots or ants, are software programs initiated by Internet search engines to find content, including web pages, images, videos, pdf files, etc. Spiders revisit website on a regular basis searching for new material. When spiders can’t follow links to or within a website, the destination page is not included among the index of web pages available to satisfy search results. As far as the search engine is concerned, that page doesn’t exist. Which means that the information contained on that page will not be available to potential customers initiating a web search.

What are some of the linking errors that negatively impact crawlability?

> Embedding navigation links in Flash. Although Flash indexing is expected to be available in the future, most search engine spiders cannot currently crawl links in Flash files.

> Embedding navigation links in JavaScript or Ajax. Googlebots and other spiders just don’t seem to like the taste of JavaScript or Ajax and are not able to crawl pages that use them.

> Embedding site navigation links in forms. Most search engine spiders don’t have the capability to interact with or make the selections required by online forms so they avoid them.

> Failing to provide authoritative links. Links provide the path by which search engines discover new websites. Inbound and reciprocal links from one site to another positively impact SEO rankings. Internal links lead from a website’s home page into important interior pages. A site that fails to provide authoritative links, while not uncrawlable, diminishes the frequency with which it is crawled which, in turn, negatively impacts SEO rankings.

Search engine optimization corrects these linking errors to make your site more crawlable and improve your SEO ranking.

Next Tuesday: Tips for improving your website’s crawlability