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.
