Hidden Tips to Make Sure the SIte gets Spidered by Google.

[pianist718]

Hi,

I see articles all over the place saying ... Make sure the code and your site is built right to get spidered by Google. Question .... what are some specific techniques?

Does that mean that a good Site map should be there, or that some sort of coding needs to be added, or important pages should be 1 link away from home page?

Please help out.

Thank you.

[wednesday]

Good navigation and a sitemap are always recomended things to have for your site.

Make sure the code and...

You should check your site for html errors in order to make sure that the spiders won't face any serious problems crawling your site. You should try this tool: http://validator.w3.org/

[bhartzer]

Links, links, and more links to your web pages will get them crawled and indexed faster. Having a good, crawlable site navigation helps, but if you don't have links from other websites to your site it just won't get crawled.

HTML validation has absolutely nothing to do with rankings or indexing--so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Paul B]

Keeping the site design in the stylesheet (CSS) and leaving the HTML/XHTML page for content will clear the clutter of <font>/<table> etc. tags for ease of spidering. You can even specify that menu items visually appear at the top of a page, but at the bottom of the code.

NOT using javascript, Flash and of course frames (though not iframes) will help too.

[Paul B]

Keeping the site design in the stylesheet (CSS) and leaving the HTML/XHTML page for content will clear the clutter of <font>/<table> etc. tags for ease of spidering. You can even specify that menu items visually appear at the top of a page, but at the bottom of the code.

NOT using javascript, Flash and of course frames (though not iframes) will help too.

[mike]

Originally Posted by pianist718

Hi,

Make sure the code and your site is built right to get spidered by Google. Question .... what are some specific techniques?

Isn't that a good question? Here's the thing, a lot of these "EXPERT SEO" companies/people that talk about all of this on-page secret super cool tricks and techniques are about 80% hot air. They gotta have something to sell after all...

Of course there are some things some spiders don't deal with all that well (as previously mentioned Flash, javascript, frames etc...) But aside from avoiding putting key nav links inside things like this, there isn't a lot to know.

Some basic things you should always do:

Have a good title. Title is important. Ideally have your key search terms in the title.

Have a good description relevent to the contents of each page. Don't just write one description and clone it onto every page throughout your site (same goes for titles).

Keywords, do a few if they aren't too much trouble - personally I think they're a waste of time. I'm not alone either.

Danny Sullivan from 2002:
"Now I can make my advice about the meta keywords tag even easier. Just don't use the tag at all! Obviously, if you personally find it or believe it to be useful, keep doing so. But I suspect it's just a waste of time, for most people."

Have good navigation. Make sure it's easy to get to anywhere from anywhere on your site.

Use alt text on images and use good link text relevant to your search terms or 'page theme' every chance you get.

That's all pretty basic stuff.

Beyond that get links. Lots of them. Find sites (ideally sites in your general subject of interest) that will link to your site. Build inbound links, maintain a nice clean ship on your site and frequently add/update/maintain your content and there you go. Bob's your uncle...